juice up your site speed with this free plugin *WARNING

In this email I wanted to share a new-ish and free plugin that can seriously juice up your site speed.

The plugin is free and in some case will dramatically speed up your site and improve your core web vitals metrics.

WARNING – DO NOT use this plugin if you’re on cheap or poor quality hosting OR if you don’t have a CDN. If you do you’re highly likely to simply crash your site due to additional load.

If you’re on one of our maintenance plans we’re already rolling this plugin out to you or have done so already.

The plugin is called Speculative Loading, link here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/speculation-rules/

It’s a stupid name and straight up bad marketing but it’s built by the WordPress Performance Team and is rock solid.

The plugin takes advantage of something called the Speculation Rules API…yes more stupid names and bad marketing.

In a nutshell, the plugin will background load all the pages linked from the page a visitor is on in a hidden browser tab. For years we’ve deployed something called Just In Time preloading as part of our speed optimizations (see https://instant.page for an explanation) but this plugin does a level of preloading well above what just in time preloading does and loads entire pages in the background.

The net effect of this preloading is that when the user does click on a new page on the site, it should be fully cached in their browser and load almost instantly.

This will dramatically lower your TTFB, FCP and LCP metrics in most cases. It does also 3-5x the load on your hosting so as per above, be mindful if you’re on poor quality hosting or don’t have a CDN.

How To Configure & Install This Plugin

The configuration is quite simple.

Install and activate the plugin

Configure the plugin as per the screenshot below

NOTE – do NOT use the Prerender option if analytics are important to you.
The Prefetch option background loads the entire page but doesn’t execute any of the javascript on it (good and what we want)

The Prerender option loads the page AND executes all the javascript which means it’ll fire your analytics code, ad tracking code and so forth so it’ll look like the visitor loaded all the pages on the site and wreak havoc with your analytics data.

That’s it for this email, hit reply if you have any questions or need more info on the items above.

If you’re looking for help with your site speed, core web vitals or SEO, click here to request a free site audit and we’ll review your site and tell you how we can help.