Optimizing Sitemap Generation for a Multi-Tenant Startup Platform

Today, we focused on enhancing the sitemap generation process for CM64 Startup Studio, a multi-tenant platform for building and managing startup websites. Our goal was to improve performance and ensure up-to-date content for search engines.

Context

CM64 Startup Studio is a low-code platform that allows users to create and manage websites using JSON-based structures. It leverages Next.js 14+ with the App Router for server-side rendering and optimal SEO performance.

Challenge

The main challenge was to generate sitemaps efficiently for multiple startups hosted on the platform while ensuring the content remains fresh and relevant. We needed to implement a caching mechanism that would work within the server-side environment of Next.js.

Solution

We updated the sitemap generation process to use Next.js's built-in caching for data fetching. Here's a simplified version of our implementation:

import { generateSitemapAndRss } from '../studio/core/render/sitemap';
import { getStartup } from '../studio/core/utils/getStartup';

async function fetchSitemapData(startupId) {
  const { entries } = await generateSitemapAndRss(startupId);
  return entries;
}

export default async function sitemap() {
  const startup = await getStartup(host);
  const entries = await fetchSitemapData(startup._id);

  return entries.map(entry => ({
    url: `https://${host}${entry.url}`,
    lastModified: new Date(entry.lastModified),
    changeFrequency: entry.changeFrequency,
    priority: entry.priority,
  }));
}

export const revalidate = 3600;// Revalidate every hour

This approach utilizes Next.js's automatic caching for data fetching functions and sets a revalidation period to ensure content freshness.

Key Insights:

1. Server-side caching requires different strategies compared to client-side caching.
2. Next.js provides powerful built-in tools for optimizing data fetching and caching.
3. Balancing performance with content freshness is crucial for effective SEO.
4. Multi-tenant architectures require careful consideration of caching strategies to ensure data isolation.

Developers working on multi-tenant platforms or SEO-critical applications can learn about efficient sitemap generation techniques, the importance of caching in server-side environments, and how to leverage Next.js features for improved performance.

Next Steps: Moving forward, we plan to implement more granular cache invalidation triggers based on content updates within each startup. We'll also explore ways to parallelize sitemap generation for multiple startups to further improve performance.