Adds speculative loading to the WP Admin for prerendering links with moderate eagerness in the Admin Bar and Admin Menu. Experimental.
Contributors: westonruter
Tags: performance
Tested up to: 6.9
Stable tag: 0.1.0
License: GPLv2 or later
This experimental plugin enables speculative loading in the WordPress Admin. For the frontend, this feature was introduced in WordPress 6.8. However, speculative loading is not enabled when a user is logged in to WordPress, and so naturally it is not enabled in the WP Admin. Since authenticated pages are usually not cached, having speculative loading enabled for logged-in users can add a lot of strain on the server. However, if your server can handle the additional load, prerendering links allows for instant page navigations, which greatly improves the user experience. The Speculative Loading plugin also has a pending change to opt in logged-in users (or just administrators) to speculative loading on the frontend.
The speculation rules used in this plugin will prerender links with moderate eagerness. The rules specifically exclude post-new.php since every hit to that URL generates a new wp_posts row in the database for the sake of auto drafts. The rules also exclude any URL that contains the _wpnonce query parameter, which are used for “action links” (e.g. trashing a post). Granted, such links are not likely to appear in the Admin Menu or Admin Bar, but beware a plugin may introduce their own non-idempotent action links. Use at your own risk.
All this being said, be mindful of the sustainability concerns for speculative loading due to the increased server load, client CPU, and network bandwidth usage. This can be especially useful on a local development environment.
There is currently no UI for this plugin. It does not depend on the Speculative Loading plugin.
Here is a demo video of this plugin for how pages can load instantly in WP Admin even with “Fast 4G” network throttling enabled:
Consider combining this with the View Transitions plugin, and enable “Admin View Transitions” option under Settings > Reading to smooth out the instant navigations with nice animations.
Also combine with the No-cache BFCache plugin (and see blog post) which enables instant back/forward navigations while logged in to WordPress, both on the frontend and in the WP Admin.
- Download the plugin ZIP from GitHub or if you have a local clone of the repo, run
npm run plugin-zip. - Visit Plugins > Add New Plugin in the WordPress Admin.
- Click Upload Plugin.
- Select the
speculative-loading-admin.zipfile on your system from step 1 and click Install Now. - Click the Activate Plugin button.
You may also install and update via Git Updater.
- Initial release.