Speed is among the most important UX factors that determine how popular your website will be with your visitors. There are several things you can do to speed up your WordPress website, including its mobile version. These general best practices are something every WordPress site owner should observe to ensure a good user experience and guarantee plenty of traffic and low bounce rates. However, there are some techniques, perhaps less well-known and practiced, that you can apply, and preloading links is one of them.
In this article, we explain why you might want your WordPress preload links on your pages, and show you how to set it all up (it’s not hard at all!).
The term “preload” is obviously, background loading before content is served To the visitor It basically means making resources available before they are actually needed, so the whole process runs faster. It’s a technique specifically used by browsers that teaches it to predict the resource (most commonly a page) a user might want to access and preload it in the background so it opens and loads faster.
Link preloading specifically means: the browser will identify the links on your page and make them available if the visitor decides to click.. Links are loaded before the visitor interacts with them and as a result the linked resource is served much faster.
Bootstrapping should not be confused with prefetching. On boot, you are telling the browser that the user will most likely click on a resource link to access that resource. Due to the high probability of need, the browser will give priority to preloading the resource (linked page).
Prefetching, on the other hand, notifies the browser that a resource may be needed and gives it a lower priority. This usually applies to resources on the next page, not the current page the visitor is viewing.
It is important to understand that preload links will not increase your page load speed. This will depend on other speed optimization factors, but link preloading will still be very beneficial for your website’s overall user experience.
The entire experience of your website includes what happens on your pages, your browsing quality, your site’s overall accessibility, and many other site-specific factors. But it also includes what drives visitors to your pages and away from them. How fast a linked page will load will have the same experience in your visitor’s mind as how quickly your own pages will load. Obviously, that’s why you’ll want to optimize it as well, and that’s exactly what link preloading is for. And for those external links. It’s even clearer for internals – you want your entire website to load fast, and if you preload your internal links, your internal pages will load faster too.
With a better overall user experience, your website will also have higher traffic and your SEO score will be higher.
That being said, keep in mind it’s not a good idea to set all links to preload without any criteria or tweaks. In particular, if you set all your connections to boot, it can have the opposite effect and even crash your server. You may also want to exclude certain pages, such as sign-in, and your cart and checkout pages if you run an online store.
Let’s learn how to set up connection preload correctly to get the maximum benefit from this simple technique.
As is often the case with WordPress, the simplest solutions involve using plugins, our favorite little helpers. For this purpose we will use Flying Pagesis a handy little plugin that uses a bit of JS code to preload links. The browser waits until it is idle and then detects all links and hovers in the viewport and then preloads them. In this way, Flying Pages ensures that the connection preload does not cause any server issues or crashes.
Start by installing the plugin. go Plugins>Add New and then type “Flying Pages” in the search box. Click after you find it To organise and then Activate.
After doing this setup, go to: Settings>Flying Pages to configure the plugin.
The first option here is to set the delay before the plugin starts preloading links regardless of hover. Here you can set any value you want – we will leave it at zero, so there is no delay.
Your next option is to set “Max requests per second”. Again, set a value you like, but remember that lower values will be lighter on your server. The recommended value is three and we’ll leave that here.
Next, you may want to check the box that says “Preload on hover only”. This is pretty self-explanatory: when enabled, this option only preloads links that the user mouses over and shows intent to navigate to those links. If you want to preload all the links in the viewport, leave the box unchecked.
Here you can also set the duration of the hover delay – the time from when the user hovers over a link until it starts booting. We will set it to 50ms.
The next option is useful – it allows you to create a list of URL keywords and formats that will not be preloaded. The default list includes your login page, purchase, shopping cart, and some common image formats. To these you can add other keywords that you want to exclude from preload.
Important note: If you’re running an affiliate program or using an affiliate plugin, be sure to add affiliate prefixes (like /go/ or /refer/) to the “Ignore keywords” list or your affiliate tracking may not work. business.
Finally, you may want to check the box that says “Disable for logged in administrators” to help reduce server load.
After reviewing the options, click on it. Save Changes.
And that’s literally all. Once configured, the Flying Pages plugin will take care of preloading the link for you. You can always go back to the settings and change the options that don’t work for you.
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Thanks to Flying Pages, even WordPress beginners can set up link preloading on their website or blog. However, keep in mind that connection preloading won’t show any improvement in your page speed tests. As we said before, link preloading only improves the overall experience of your website by making the link click faster, not your actual page load speed.
