If you want to accelerate your WordPress site, by using WordPress Instant Page is a lesser-known tactic that exploits the “preloading” power.

At the end of the day, website navigation is easy. You go to a tab, find a connection that interests you, click it, and repeat the process. Behind the scenes, each page is loaded by your browser after you click on a link. However, imagine if your browser loaded a new page before clicking on it. At the front end, the only change will be to load the second page quicker than normal.

That is what preloading is – use the application to tell visitors’ browsers to preload different sites. As a result, users will experience smoother navigation, and if you execute it right, they will never find further data loading in the background.

In this post, we’ll break down how preloading works, and then show you how to use the Instant Page script to add WordPress features. We’ll also check how much impact preloading makes in real life.

Typically, preload tags are used to import stylesheets or scripts. Nevertheless, just-in-time preloading is moving a step further. It tells your browser to start loading a different page when you connect with a particular connection.

Your browser doesn’t do anything about the tab you’re preloading, except to cover it. This means that when you click on a page, the loading times will be faster than normal. Bear in mind, however, the just-in-time preloading only works for:

• Internal links on your website
• Links to external sites (if you like!)

In other words, adding just-in-time preloading to your website will make internal navigation quicker. This does not, however, impact loading times from search engines or other websites.

Instant Page is an open-source script that you can use to add just-in-time preloading to your website. The script begins loading new pages as soon as users hover over a connection – even if it just preloads static content.

According to Instant Page, when a user is hovering over a 65 ms page, there is a 50 per cent probability that they will click on that page. From this stage, your browser should have some time to start loading the page in the background, leading to shorter loading times.

The best way to use the WordPress Instant Website

While we’ll show you the manual method for using Instant Page on WordPress in the next section, the easiest way to get started with Instant Page on WordPress is by using the dedicated plugin:

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How to manually use the WordPress Instant Page

Go to your WordPress Appearance > Theme Editor > and search for footer.php

Supedium recommend you to create a Child Theme before adding the code to avoid your code being overwritten when the next time you update your theme.

Now, go ahead and paste the following code snippet below and click on save changes before you navigate away.

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

Did You Know?

For desktop

Before a user clicks on a page, they hover over the page with their mouse. Once a user has hovered for 65 ms, there is one chance out of two that they will click on the connection, so instant.page begins preloading at this time, leaving an average of over 300 ms to preload the page.

Another option is to load the pages when the user begins pressing the mouse without preloading it. It results in zero wasted requests while still boosting page loads by an average of 80 ms.

You can also preload on the hover or as soon as a connection is visible and click when the user starts pressing the mouse to make your pages the fastest in the world.

For Mobile

The user begins pressing their monitor before removing it, leaving an average of 90 ms to preload the tab.

Another choice is to preload links as soon as they are available.