Speculative Loading
by WordPress Performance Team on WordPress.org
Enables browsers to speculatively prerender or prefetch pages to achieve near-instant loads based on user interaction.
This plugin adds support for the Speculation Rules API, which allows defining rules by which certain URLs are dynamically prefetched or prerendered.
See the Speculation Rules WICG specification draft.
By default, the plugin is configured to prerender WordPress frontend URLs when the user interacts with a relevant link. This can be customized via the “Speculative Loading” section in the Settings > Reading admin screen.
A filter can be used to exclude certain URL paths from being eligible for prefetching and prerendering (see FAQ section). Alternatively, you can add the no-prerender CSS class to any link ( tag) that should not be prerendered. See FAQ for more information.
Browser support
The Speculation Rules API is a new web API, and the functionality used by the plugin is supported in Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, or Opera using version 121 or above. Other browsers such as Safari and Firefox will ignore the functionality with no ill effects; they will simply not benefit from the speculative loading. Note that certain browser extensions may disable preloading by default.
- Browser support for the Speculation Rules API in general
- Information on document rules syntax support used by the plugin
This plugin was formerly known as Speculation Rules.
