Boost Your Website Speed: WordPress Unveils Performance Plugin for Lightning-Fast Load Times

Speculative Loading

WordPress recently introduced an official plugin that incorporates speculative loading, a modern technology aimed at enhancing site speed and enhancing user experience.

Speculative loading is a technique that fetches pages or resources before a user clicks a link to navigate to another webpage.

The official WordPress page about this new functionality describes it:

The Speculation Rules API is a new web API that allows users to define rules for prefetching and prerendering URLs based on user interaction. This is done using JSON syntax, essentially preloading URLs before navigation.

One example of using this API is to prerender any links on a page when a user hovers over them. With the Speculation Rules API, "prerender" means prerendering the entire page, including executing JavaScript. This can result in almost instant load times when the user clicks on the link, as the page would likely already be fully loaded. Keep in mind that this is just one possible configuration.

The latest WordPress plugin now includes support for the Speculation Rules API. According to the Mozilla developer pages, this API is aimed at enhancing performance for upcoming navigations. Instead of focusing on individual resource files, it directs attention to document URLs. As a result, it is more beneficial for multi-page applications (MPAs) rather than single-page applications (SPAs).

The Performance Lab Plugin

The Speculation Rules API offers a different option to the commonly used feature. It is created to replace the Chrome-only deprecated feature. This API brings numerous enhancements compared to these technologies, as well as a more detailed and customizable way to specify which documents should be prefetched or prerendered.

The official WordPress performance team has created a new plugin for users to test before it may become a part of the WordPress core. This is a great chance to be among the first to try out the latest performance technologies.

The new WordPress plugin is designed to prerender "WordPress frontend URLs," including pages, posts, and archive pages. Users can adjust how it functions in the settings.

Settings > Reading > Speculative Loading

Browser Compatibility

The Speculative API is compatible with Chrome 108. However, the new plugin requires Chrome 121 or a newer version, which was launched in early 2024.

Browsers that do not support the plugin will just disregard it, without impacting the user experience.

Check out the new Speculative Loading WordPress plugin developed by the official core WordPress performance team.

Speculative Loading By WordPress Performance Team

Editor's P/S:

Speculative loading is an exciting new technology that has the potential to significantly improve the speed and performance of websites. By prefetching pages or resources before a user clicks a link, speculative loading can eliminate the lag time that is often associated with page navigation. This can result in a much smoother and more enjoyable user experience.

The new WordPress plugin that incorporates speculative loading is a welcome addition to the WordPress ecosystem. It makes it easy for WordPress users to take advantage of this new technology. The plugin is still in its early stages of development, but it is already showing promising results. I am eager to see how speculative loading develops in the future and how it can be used to improve the performance of even more websites.