How does this affect pageview tracking ?

  • Resolved Dan Claudiu G.

    (@dcgavril)


    7 months, 2 weeks ago

    Hello,

    Thank you for developing this plugin.

    I’ve seen some caching plugins offering similar solutions for prerendering the pages when the user is hovering over the links, but some of them are affecting the page view tracking, and the rest of the marketing/personalization side of things based on what the user has seen.

    How is this different or does it affect page views tracking ?

    Thank you.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support tunetheweb

    (@tunetheweb)

    Hi Dan,

    Prerendering can affect analytics and personalization.

    For client-side JavaScript, is recommended to delay these until the page clicks and some solutions (like Google Analytics) already do this automatically for prerender. See here: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/prerender-pages#impact-on-analytics. Additionally cross-origin iframes are not loaded until activation which can further avoid issues here.

    Speculating on hover (moderate) increases the chance the page will be loaded, over preloading without this signal, and thus reduces the risk here. Alternatively, the plugin offers to only speculate on mouse/pointer down (conservative) which further reduces the risk here and is an option for sites which are concerned about this, at the cost of having less of a lead time and so less of a performance gain.

    A prerendered page is linked to the page that prerenders it, so personalisation may already be known by this point and changes (e.g. browsing other products, or logging in/out) may require a new page load, and hence a new prerender anyway, which will take these into account. But it definitely is something to be aware of and test!

    Thread Starter Dan Claudiu G.

    (@dcgavril)

    Thank you for your reply, Barry !

    Yes, I’ve done some tests and it seems that Google Analytics is taking the preloading into account and it seems to not affect it much, at least this is what I’ve seen with the GA4 version, because in the past I had some issues with the Universal that was registering the preloads (or at least I don’t know exactly what tricks the caching plugin was doing in order to preload the content).

    This may be useful to be written in the plugin description so that the users will be on the lookout for Analytics that might show more visits than they are in reality (some would think that because they have a “performance” plugin installed, suddenly they have way more visitors…).

    Hopefully this technique will be implemented into other browsers in the future.

    Wishing you a great day !

    Plugin Author Weston Ruter

    (@westonruter)

    This may be useful to be written in the plugin description so that the users will be on the lookout for Analytics that might show more visits than they are in reality (some would think that because they have a “performance” plugin installed, suddenly they have way more visitors…).

    Good idea! Opened a pull request to add this as a FAQ: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1155

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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