This is another player in the game of (pre)rendering the page of the link that you’re about to click on before you click it. The point of which is to get a performance boost for extremely little effort. You’re putting the browser to work getting that next page ready for, say, that half a second between where you hover a link and when you click it, when otherwise the browser wouldn’t have been doing anything.
Instant.page is another player, and I’ve been sufficiently convinced by its methodology to the extent that I run it here on this site right now. I don’t really know the difference between the two. And they aren’t the only players either. Google has quicklink and there’s guess-js for really exotic preloading.
It’s a bit of a pity that Safari and Firefox don’t support <link rel="prerender">
, as it really seems to me the absolute easiest way to pull this off would be to drop that on the page where, on mouseover
of a link, it points to the href
of that link.
4 years ago I was using this:
https://prerender.io
For anyone who needs this type of functionality I can recommend:
https://unpoly.com/
Seems a bit like turbolinks? https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks Maybe a bit less about prerendering and more about that kinda “fake SPA” approach which I also think can be awesome.
Looks an expensive tweek from the hosting side to the user data consumption
I think that’s part of the game. They try to be really sure you’re about to visit that link before they prerender. The REALLY EXPENSIVE way to do this is to prerender every page on your site when you land there. Sure that’ll be fast for those next clicks, but at a super high cost of bandwidth. I think the trick is riding the line.
Thanks Chris!
Big shout out for all your recent posts! It seems like everyday I come across a short nugget of wisdom like this one or a shout out from you to (what seems like) a random developer you are digging on lately. What a way to spread knowledge and love during these times! You rock!
I’m super excited to know about instant.page and I’m surely gonna use it in a WordPress site I’m working on. Will see how well it plays with WooCommerce. Thanks for the amazing post.
How about Google’s Quicklink.js?