WordPress plugin intelligence profile

Speculative Loading

Enables browsers to speculatively prerender or prefetch pages to achieve near-instant loads based on user interaction.

WP PlugIndex snapshot

Current directory snapshot

Tested up to WordPress 7.1
Current version1.7.0
WordPress coverageTested up to WordPress 7.1
Minimum stackWP 6.9 · PHP 7.4
Directory statusactive
Last directory update26 Aug 20262mo ago
Active installations70K+Adoption metric — not a quality score
WordPress.org rating5.0 / 5 from 18 ratings
Official packageDirect from WordPress.org

Repository metrics are context, not quality scores. Active installations measure adoption and can strongly reflect a plugin’s age and historical popularity. Ratings, recent updates and “Tested up to” metadata also do not guarantee modern code, error-free operation, security, feature completeness or suitability for a particular site. Why active installs don’t tell the whole story →

WP PlugIndex currently records Speculative Loading version 1.7.0 as active, updated 2mo ago and tested up to WordPress 7.1.

Overview

About this plugin

This plugin adds support for the Speculation Rules API, which allows defining rules by which certain URLs are dynamically prefetched or prerendered. 8, but it only prefetches with conservative eagerness by default. e.

when interacting with a link), and it provides a user interface to customize the mode and eagerness via the “Speculative Loading” section on the Settings > Reading admin screen.

By default, speculative loading is only enabled for logged-out users, since unauthenticated pages are typically only eligible for caching and so more efficient to prefetch/prerender. This means that sites with frequent logged-in users on the frontend—such as e-commerce, forums, or membership sites—will not benefit from the feature.

If your server can handle the additional load (for example, with persistent object caching), you can opt in to enable speculative loading for all logged-in users or for administrators only. This setting exclusively affects frontend pages; admin screens are always excluded.

A filter can be used to exclude certain URL paths from being eligible for prefetching and prerendering (see FAQ section). Alternatively, you can add the no-prerender CSS class to any link ( <a> tag) that should not be prerendered. See FAQ for more information.

Browser support

The Speculation Rules API is a new web API, and the functionality used by the plugin is supported in Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, or Opera using version 121 or above. Other browsers such as Safari and Firefox will ignore the functionality with no ill effects; they will simply not benefit from the speculative loading. Note that certain browser extensions may disable preloading by default.

  • Browser support for the Speculation Rules API in general
  • Information on document rules syntax support used by the plugin

This plugin was formerly known as Speculation Rules.

WordPress.org metadata

Plugin tags

Topics listed for this plugin in the WordPress.org directory.

  • speculation rules
  • javascript
  • performance
  • prefetch
  • prerender
Compatibility & maintenance

Compatibility & maintenance

Tested with WP 7.1

Marked as tested with the current WordPress 7.1 release.

Current WordPress releaseWordPress 7.1
WordPress.org Tested up to7.1
Minimum requirementsWordPress 6.9 · PHP 7.4
Update activity26 Aug 20262mo ago

“Tested up to” is directory metadata supplied by the plugin author. WP PlugIndex does not turn an older declaration into a claim that the plugin is incompatible.

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