WordPress launched an official plugin that provides assist for a leading edge expertise referred to as speculative loading that may assist increase web site efficiency and enhance the person expertise for web site guests.
Speculative Loading
Speculative loading is a method that fetches pages or assets earlier than a person clicks a hyperlink to navigate to a different webpage.
The official WordPress web page about this new performance describes it:
“The Hypothesis Guidelines API is a brand new net API… It permits defining guidelines to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of sure construction primarily based on person interplay, in JSON syntax—or in different phrases, speculatively preload these URLs earlier than the navigation.
This API can be utilized, for instance, to prerender any hyperlinks on a web page each time the person hovers over them. Additionally, with the Hypothesis Guidelines API, “prerender” really means to prerender your entire web page, together with operating JavaScript. This could result in near-instant load occasions as soon as the person clicks on the hyperlink because the web page would have almost definitely already been loaded in its entirety. Nevertheless that’s solely one of many attainable configurations.”
The brand new WordPress plugin provides assist for the Hypothesis Guidelines API. The Mozilla developer pages, an awesome useful resource for HTML technical understanding describes it like this:
“The Hypothesis Guidelines API is designed to enhance efficiency for future navigations. It targets doc URLs quite than particular useful resource recordsdata, and so is sensible for multi-page purposes (MPAs) quite than single-page purposes (SPAs).
The Hypothesis Guidelines API offers an alternative choice to the widely-available <hyperlink rel=”prefetch”> characteristic and is designed to supersede the Chrome-only deprecated <hyperlink rel=”prerender”> characteristic. It offers many enhancements over these applied sciences, together with a extra expressive, configurable syntax for specifying which paperwork ought to be prefetched or prerendered.”
Efficiency Lab Plugin
The brand new plugin was developed by the official WordPress efficiency group which sometimes rolls out new plugins for customers to check forward of attainable inclusion into the precise WordPress core. So it’s a superb alternative to be first to check out new efficiency applied sciences.
The brand new WordPress plugin is by default set to prerender “WordPress frontend URLs” that are pages, posts, and archive pages. The way it works may be fine-tuned underneath the settings:
Settings > Studying > Speculative Loading
Browser Compatibility
The Speculative API is supported by Chrome 108 nevertheless the precise guidelines utilized by the brand new plugin require Chrome 121 or greater. Chrome 121 was launched in early 2024.
Browsers that don’t assist will merely ignore the plugin and could have no impact on the person expertise.
Try the brand new Speculative Loading WordPress plugin developed by the official core WordPress efficiency group.
