Elaborate “Auto Prerender”

@tdechangy Thanks for contacting me. That portion of about the Auto Prerender is not supposed to be in the plugin- it is part of an improvement I am working on and I had accidentally included it too early. I will make an update shortly which removes that.

The version I am working on will have an auto prerender feature that connects with Google Analytics, and it will be pretty awesome!

Cool, could keep me in touch here would be nice ??

@tdechangy I will publish that update this weekend.

Excellent, I’m quite curious to see your proposal.

– While I’m not yet very buzzy on the web-dev place I like to find all possible best practices, especially about performance, while WordPress can quickly become bloated with plugins. I found it especially a nightmare when starting ecommerce stuff since it might need a couple of plugins if you want some serious UX and modern functionalities. *Small question here : Do you think that a Woocommerce store should absolutely use a far more powerful server than normal presentation or blogging websites ?

– I am a bit in trouble to understand the good way to use your plugin about pages or even posts prefetch, or preload for who wants it. Since you plugin allows only global setup it means that we should add prefetch of (near) all pages, and let’s say that a blog posts multiple posts per week or day (who knows) it becomes unreliable to have to work that way, not mentioning that inserting ALL posts in prefetch would become even more bloated than using numerous plugins. If you could describe in more details how to use your plugin per website configuration type (blog, ecommerce) and size, this would be super helpful. >> Read more about my suggestion below for a kind one-fits-all solution.

– The reason why I especially answer here is for a feature that I was looking for when I found your plugin, and this could handle most cases without any headache. I would call it : “Prefetch links on hover”.
It’s quite simple and I believe super powerful. Whatever link the user hovers it launches a Prefetch of that page or any consistent related stuff. To make it as efficient as possible it is also usual in such cases to set a delay before sending the prefetch request. the delay should be set in milliseconds and probably between 50 and 500. Tests should be done to estimate best value.
+> code sample about it :
– https://macarthur.me/posts/best-ish-practices-for-dynamically-prefetching-and-prerendering-with-javascript while I would probably only prefetch, but prerender could be optionally nice too (?).
– https://gist.github.com/mcnamee/1daa78e7bf6271bc2107ec83444d67f5

+> these posts about nice Codes/plugins (the last one beeing probably more relevant..?) :
– https://themeisle.com/blog/instant-page-wordpress/
– https://dev.to/gijovarghese/how-i-made-wordpress-faster-with-1kb-javascript-2ne9
– https://wpspeedmatters.com/quicklink-vs-instant-page-vs-flying-pages/

And while I’m super curious about your impressive upcoming feature, I believe that this proposal could be the N°1 solution for most users since it’s super simple setup.

Regards.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by tdechangy.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by tdechangy.

1) Yes I do believe ecommerce sites should invest in higher performance servers. Time is money right?

2) The “pro” version of the plugin I’m working on will allow for hints to be created which are specific for certain posts/pages. (Each post will have its own unique auto preconnect hints created). It doesn’t make since to use many prerender, or preload hints because those resources would go unused on many posts.

3) I have considered this idea, and it has many good points. However, it would not work for mobile users (50% of users), and the most common scenario this would be used is when a user is moving their cursor over a menu, dropdown or otherwise. In that case many link are obviously close together, and frequently you must move your cursor over/across some nav links you have no intention of navigating to. If you designed a script to fire when a cursor is moving towards a nav link, I would think it would fire too often. A better solution, in my opinion, is to do a preload/prerender on the “mousedown” event. That would work for mobile users, and would be more precisely targeted to loading links which will be used. The drawback of this is that it would only save the amount of time which passes until you lift your finger off the mouse (or phone screen), which must be at most 0.1 seconds. Doesn’t seem like much of an advantage.
I will take a look at those articles and see what they say.

@tdechangy I have made the update I mentioned, please update and let me know what you think. I added some more thorough explanation of how the auto preconnect feature works.

Hi Sam,
Thanks for your previous answers.
About “1) Yes I do believe ecommerce sites should invest in higher performance servers. Time is money right?” :
What do you mostly see as good standard server for average ecommerce in terms of minimum memory among other specs ?

About your new release :
UI estimate : Why adding one more place for explanation while the (?) symbol is the right discrete place to do this ?

1. Some settings are still not clear so add some explanation there too pls :
– “Disable automatically generated WordPress resource hints?”
– “Send resource hints in HTML head or HTTP header?”

2. The “Auto Prerender feature” is now removed, I thought that you already gave a first usage capability.

@tdechangy
I really can’t tell you what the proper specs are for an ecommerce site. I suggest getting a webhost that allows for scalability easily. If you’re just starting out, you can get a cheaper plan, and upgrade as you get more traffic.

It would be a lot of text in the (?) symbol, so I just gave it its own block. Still thinking about the ideal way to display this…

WP automatically creates three DNS prefetch hints, which many people find annoying because those URL’s in the hints are not used by many sites, and those can be replaced with this plugin.

Hints can be delivered to the browser in these two manners, the effectiveness of either is about the same. It’s a bit complicated to explain how each of these works here.

I only mistakenly had some text referring to the “auto prerender” feature in place, but the actual feature isn’t ready yet. Stay tuned..