WordPress has rolled out a groundbreaking performance plugin that introduces support for the Speculative Loading API, promising a significant acceleration in webpage load times and an enhanced user experience.
Rendering a webpage involves assembling its components so that it instantaneously displays. While conventional rendering occurs when the browser downloads HTML, images, and resources, prerendering anticipates the user’s next move, assembling the webpage in the background.
This official WordPress plugin empowers browsers to prerender the entire webpage that users might navigate to next, anticipating their actions based on hover behavior. Chrome, for instance, prioritizes prerendering when there’s at least an 80% probability of a user navigating to another webpage.
Unlike previous solutions that merely prefetch resources like JavaScript and CSS, the Speculative Loading API facilitates prerendering the entire webpage, addressing a longstanding issue. This API, as described by WordPress, allows defining rules to speculatively preload URLs based on user interaction, significantly improving performance for future navigations.
Developed by the official WordPress performance team, this plugin is designed to optimize performance for multi-page applications, superseding deprecated technologies like <link rel=”prerender”>. The plugin is configured to prerender WordPress frontend URLs by default, with settings customizable under Settings > Reading > Speculative Loading.
While the Speculative API is supported by Chrome 108, the plugin’s rules mandate Chrome 121 or higher for optimal performance. However, browsers lacking support will disregard the plugin, ensuring no disruption to the user experience.
Regarding prerendering analytics, platforms like Google Analytics and Google Publisher Tags have adapted to handle prerenders, delaying activations until user engagement. However, there may be conflicts with ad blocker extensions like uBlock Origin, cautioned by a WordPress plugin developer.
In conclusion, WordPress’s innovative performance plugin promises near-instantaneous load times and an improved browsing experience, showcasing the platform’s commitment to advancing web technologies.
