Do you want to preload links in WordPress and improve loading speeds?
May 17. 2022
When running a website, user experience is one of the most important things to have in mind. You want to ensure your visitors will gladly come back to your website and even recommend it to others. Page loading speed plays a major role in boosting the user experience on your website. If your website is slow, most visitors will not even wait for the page to fully load before clicking on that lethal x on the top right corner of their screens. One of the best ways to improve loading speeds is to preload links in WordPress. To help you do this, experienced WordPress professionals created a detailed guide which you can find further in this article. Now let’s get to work!
Why should you preload links in WordPress?
Web browsers can load links before a user clicks on them. This is called link “preloading.” So when they get to the page, it’s already ready and fully loaded. It’s a quite simple way to make your website faster and thus boost user experience on your website. And you probably already know how making your WordPress website run faster is one of the most important things you can do for your website.
Having a faster site can help you get more people to your blog by improving your WordPress SEO. In this case, your visitors are more likely to stay on your website. They’ll see more pages when your internal pages are already ready.
There is one thing you should keep in mind, though. You’ll have to make sure you set up preloading the right way. Mistakes are very common when setting this up so it’s important to make sure to avoid them. There are a lot of things that could go wrong if you have too many aggressive settings and all of your internal links are already loaded.
Therefore, it’s crucial to preload links in WordPress in just the right way as only then will you be able to speed up your WordPress site loading. Further in this article, that’s exactly what you’re going to find out.
How to preload links in WordPress and thus boost the loading speed?
In most cases, solutions to any WordPress lie in using the right plugin and this is no different. The easiest way to preload links in WordPress is to use the Flying pages plugin. This plugin is great as it adds intelligent preloading to make sure that preloading won’t cause your site to crash or even slow down. In case it doesn’t find any problems like that, then the plugin will stop all preloads.
The first thing to do, of course, is to instal and activate this plugin. After you activate the plugin, go to Settings then click on Flying Pages in your WordPress admin panel. You’ll now be able to change the plugin settings.
Setting up the Flying Pages plugin
Now that you’ve accessed the plugin settings, let’s see what the Flying Pages plugin will let you do. The first thing to do is to set the “Delay to start preloading” time in the drop-down box. This is the delay to start preloading links if your user’s mouse isn’t moving in the browser window for a certain amount of time. You can change this, but we recommend keeping the default setting of “0 seconds” as the best one.
The next setting you can change is “Max requests per second“. In general, the lower this number is, the less of an impact it will have on your server. The default setting is “3 requests” and it works well for most WordPress hosts. However, you can always change it if you feel a lower number will work better for you.
Afterwards, you can check the box that says, “Preload only when the mouse moves over“. This means that preloading links will only happen when people click on them. It will also preload the page right before they do so, so it will be ready when they do.
When the user moves their mouse over a link, there is a 400ms delay before they click it. This makes the load time seem almost instant. Mouse hover delay is also something you can set, but you can also change it. As soon as someone clicks on a link, this is how long it will take for preloading to start.
Below this setting, you can also find a list of words that the plugin will not use when preloading. These are the login pages and images that most people use. You can leave the list the way it is, or you can add more keywords if you want.
For example, let’s say you run an online store. You might want to add pages such as cart and other dynamic pages to this list. This way, they won’t be preloaded when people visit your site.
The last option is to turn off preloading for admins. Overall, this will help to cut down on the load on your website’s server. If you only want the preload to start for visitors who aren’t logged in as admins, then check the box next to it. At the bottom of the page, find and click on the “Save Changes” button and that’s it – you’ve successfully set up link preloading on your website now.
Final thoughts
As said, the page loading speed on your website is one of the most important factors that influence user experience. Given that your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible, ensuring your website runs quickly should be one of your priorities. But now that you know how to preload links in WordPress, you can easily achieve this. Of course, you can skip all of this and simply reach out to WordPress experts who’ll take care of preloading links on your website and so much more. Your website will get the care it deserves and in return, you’ll get free time to dedicate to whatever you want.