WordPress Prefetch will download the required resources, save them locally, and serve them quickly when needed.

As part of our WordPress Support Service, Bobcares responds to all inquiries, big or small.

Let’s take a closer look at what Prefetch and DNS-Prefetch are and how to use them in WordPress.

WordPress Prefetch

We now have a plethora of options for speeding up the WordPress site’s loading time. However, concentrating solely on loading the current webpage’s content is insufficient. We also need to improve the resources required by linked pages and third-party sites loaded on the site.

This can be accomplished by combining the Prefetch and DNS-Prefetch attributes in the header section with the link meta tag. This will instruct browsers to load resources ahead of time in order to improve loading speed when they are required.

Prefetch Vs DNS-Prefetch

To better understand this, let’s look at a simple example case. The following two items are included in a WordPress post:

• A link to an important page on the site – the important page contains a large-scale infographic image. We anticipate that nearly every user who lands on this page will click on the link and visit the important page. We can use the prefetch attribute in this case to tell the browser to start downloading the infographic image that is required if the user visits the important page. The important page will load faster because the large image has already been downloaded and stored in the browser’s local cache.
• External website link – Our current post makes use of Google Fonts, which can be found at fonts.gstatic.com and fonts.googleapis.com. When users load the page, the browser must resolve the Google servers’ host names and obtain their IP addresses. This could cause the fonts to take longer to load, especially if our internet connection is slow. We can use DNS-Prefetch to speed up the domain name resolution process for the external domains we need on our site in this case.

We hope that these two examples demonstrate how to use Prefetch and DNS-Prefetch. Now we’ll look at how to use Prefetch and DNS-Prefetch in your WordPress site.

Using Prefetch in WordPress

Prefetch, as previously stated, instructs the browser to fetch resources you believe will be needed later as part of a subsequent user interaction. This will take advantage of the browser’s idle time to download resources such as CSS, JavaScript, and images. To use Prefetch, we can manually add the following link tag to the site’s header section.

We can also perform the same function by using the “next” attribute instead of “prefetch.”

However, we’ll need a plugin like Insert Code in Header and Footer to insert the link meta tag in this case. Instead, we can create various types of browser hints using a dedicated Pre* Party Resource Hints plugin.

Steps to install Pre* Party Resource Hints plugin

1. Firstly, navigate to the Plugins > Add New section and search for the Pre* Party Resource Hints plugin.
2. Then go ahead and install and activate the plugin on the website.
3. Then, to add Prefetch to the site, go to the Pre* Party menu.
4. Scroll down to the Add New Resource Hint section of the Insert Hints tab.
5. Then, enter the complete URL of the resource file we want to prefetch in the Domain or URL box.
6. When we select the Prefetch radio button, the plugin will automatically disable the fields that aren’t being used for prefetching.
7. Then, select the appropriate file type from the as attribute dropdown. For example, we choose image because we entered the image URL in the Domain or URL box.
8. Leave the MIME Type field empty.
9. Finally, at the bottom of the page, click the Insert Resource Links button to save the changes.

That’s it. The plugin will automatically add the required header link tag to the site. Just above the Add New Resource Hint section, we can see all of the resource hints we’ve created and change or delete them at any time.

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Conclusion

To sum up, our Support team demonstrates how to use Prefetch and DNS-Prefetch in WordPress.