Is Your Plugin Compatible with Instant Page?

From a quick look at how the plugin works, it seems similar to Flying Pages in that it relies on prefetch links. Please review a recent support topic about that plugin. In short, Speculative Loading should be seen as an alternative plugin which provides additional benefits by being able to prerender pages rather than just prefetch them. Prerendering allows for pages to load truly instantly. That said, Firefox does not yet support the Speculation Rules API which the plugin depends on.

Instant.page also merged support for Speculation Rules earlier this year (See this PR), though haven’t yet released a version including that addition. In theory that would give the best of both worlds, but with the addition of a bit of JavaScript to detect and use them both.

The Speculative Loading plugin is JS free, but only supports this API.

So advantages of this plugin:

• JS-free so a lighter implementation.
• Several WordPress-specific guards implemented (e.g. don’t speculate admin pages, or WooCommerce links..etc.)
• Being actively maintained – two maintainers answering questions on a Sunday night for example ??
• Allows full prerender for even faster loads.
• Allow prefetch into memory, which has some benefits.

However, disadvantages of this plugin:

• No fallback for unsupporting browsers (like Firefox and Safari).

two maintainers answering questions on a Sunday night for example ??

Sunday morning actually ??

You tomato, I say tomato…

One other potential benefit is that Speculative Loading is proposed for merging WordPress core, so by using this plugin now you can help beta test a new core feature and support working out kinks for others.

Dear Gentlemen,

Thanks a million! Your answers make perfect sense.

My plan is to leave both Instant Page (IP) and Speculative Loading (SL) enabled at the same time and monitor the results over the next 1-3 months. So far, no issues (i.e., no speed impact, no console errors, etc.).

The only additional questions at this time are:

1. How does the Google browser handle both IP and SL when enabled at this time time? (i.e., priority level)
2. How do I know SL is working? (i.e., page source “rel=prerender”?). Nothing showing on our site.

Last, but not the least, drinks on me for assisting on this beautiful Sunday.

Again, thank you. Cheers! ??

For both questions I would suggest reading this post (full disclosure—I wrote it!):

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/application/debugging-speculation-rules

I’m not sure what settings you’re using, but prefetches (for both plugins) should be available in the network tab of DevTools )as detailed in the post). Double check both are working as per the given settings and not double fetching the same resource twice.

If using prerender you need to use the dedicated panels in the DevTools Application panel to debug and ensure it’s working as expected.

Also, if you can share the site, then I can have a look to see if I can spot anything weird about the combo of both plugins.

Correction: (see above)

1. How does the Google browser handle both IP and SL when enabled at the same time? (i.e., priority level)

Thank you.

Hi @tunetheweb,

Thanks for that. Commendable. Long read. Where can I find a summary? ??

Meanwhile, you’re welcome to visit our website for your analysis and comments on IP and SL.

Note: Our website is loading IP via the plugin, Perfmatters.

Have a great week. Thank you!

Update:

I have deciced to disable IP and use only SL at this time. No further action needed at this time.

Thank you all for your help!

Update:

Here’s a great article on Speculative Loading. Great summary and explains how to verify it’s working on your website.

Cheers!

@tunetheweb Thanks for contributing in this thread really helped me out