Add Preload on a Website to Improve Website Loading Time

Preload can improve your website’s speed by 100 milliseconds and make the website’s loading experience smooth.

What is Preload?

Preloading is a function that load web pages before user click on the link. When a user hovers on a link, then the browser load that in the background. When a user clicks on the link or button and realises that, it will instant that page. This all process called ‘preloading’.

Why preloading is useful?

When a user clicks on a button or link, then two things are going to happen

1. User click on the button
2. User releases the button

In both these processes, it took an average of 200-600 milliseconds. But, when you use preloading, this extra latency time will improve. According to the instant.page, Amazon found if they improve the average of 100 milliseconds, they can get 1% more sales. But it is not a simple job to improve this latency. Because they already have the best server and infrastructure. But, this in-time preload can improve their 100 milliseconds in loading.

Preload only loads HTML content that’s mean, the image CSS and JavaScript only load when a user clicks on the link.

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• How to Optimize Image in WordPress for Faster Webpage Load?
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How preload is bad?

Everything has its pros and cons. Preload can improve a website’s latency but it can send unwanted request to the server. How? When a user goes on your site and he hovers on a link, then there are two probabilities –

1. He clicks on the link/button.
2. He ignores it and scrolls down.

If the user goes with condition 1, then this preloading can improve your website’s loading speed and gives a smooth and fast user experience.

But, if the user goes with condition 2, mean he does not click on the link and ignores it. Then, it already preloaded the page in the background. It’s means it wastes now preloaded page, and it consumed CPU and user’s bandwidth.

So thus, in condition 2, the preload can be bad for your site.

How to add preload on the website?

I looked on the web and found something that can do this work for every type of site. You can add this by using these methods. Make sure you use only one method from the below.

1. Using instal.page

Instant.page is a free open-source website that provides a free preloading solution for the web. Go to the website and copy the code and just past it in the footer of your website. It is a tiny JavaScript file that is hosted on CloudFlare CDN. I gave the same code below –

<script src="//instant.page/5.1.0" type="module" integrity="sha384-by67kQnR+pyfy8yWP4kPO12fHKRLHZPfEsiSXR8u2IKcTdxD805MGUXBzVPnkLHw"></script>

2. Using WordPress plugin

Instan.page has an official plugin that is free of cost. Just install this small plugin and add a tiny script on your site easily that enable preloading on your WordPress website.

Download Plugin

Conclusion

If you have a blog site, then preloading can helpful. But, if you are already WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache plugin then you don’t need any other plugin. They have an in-built preloading feature. All you have to do is go to the plugin’s setting and turn on that. Preload currently supported on Google Chrome and Firefox only.