Before you click a link that interests you on a web page, you hover your mouse over that link before clicking on it. Guess how much time spent between these two actions? Believe it or not, it is well over 300 ms. So, why not taking advantage of this timespan and doing something useful to speed up the load speed?

instant.page is a web service that offers just like that, preloading a page right before a use clicks on it.

And it’s dead easy to implement. All you need is to add the following HTML snippet just before </body> tag.

<script src="//instant.page/1.1.0" type="module" integrity="sha384-EwBObn5QAxP8f09iemwAJljc+sU+eUXeL9vSBw1eNmVarwhKk2F9vBEpaN9rsrtp"></script> 

Behind the scene, it uses the prefetch technique like this:

<link rel="prefetch" href="url">

and the source code is only 125 readable lines on Github.

While it sounds very nice, not all browser supports the Prefetch. Chrome has full support. Firefox also supports it but will redownload the page if it’s not cached. But both Sofari and Edge don’t support out of the box, unfortunately.