Do you want to preload links in WordPress and improve loading speed?
Link preloading is a browser technology that loads links in the background before a site visitor clicks on them, making your website appear faster.
In this article, we will show you how to preload WordPress links for faster loading speeds easily.
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Should You Preload Links in WordPress?
Link preloading is when your web browser will load the link in the background before the user clicks on it. That way, by the time they get to the page, it’s already loaded.
To understand if this will improve the speed of your WordPress site, you should consider the following:
This is a technique that will bring an advantage only if the visitor is already on the site,so those who will see a benefit will be those who decide to check two or more pages of your site.
If a user only visits a page on your website when they are referred by Google or another site, they will experience the same in terms of speed as if link preloading was not enabled.
How to Preload Links in WordPress
There are many ways to preload links on your WordPress site.
Preloading Links requires the use of free plugins or the use of premium plugins that have the functionality built in.
Let’s start with my favorite
Preload Links using Perfmatters
Perfmatters, my favorite optimization plugin has the preload links option.
You only have to activate the options and start seeing how fast the pages of your sites start to load
Preload Links using Flying Pages
A free plugin that does the job is Flying Pages, this plugin was created by Gijo Varghese, the speed expert behind some lightweight speed plugins and Flying Press.
Flying Pages has more options so you can set it up as you want it to work
My Take on Preloading Links
I have used the functionality to preload links during short periods on some of my sites and the functionality does what it says it does.
I am not currently using the functionality because my sites load quite fast due to being somewhat minimalistic and served via a CDN and I am unsure about the impact that this feature has.
So I might give this functionality a try later, I could probably delay it using Perfmatters so it doesn’t load as soon as a visitor comes to my site.
