Google Chrome prerendering and how developer can get ready

Last year, Google announced of Chrome Prerendering, that is a feature added to Chrome to improve user-visible page load times. Chrome will load the page even if the user is not clicked on it. So that when user actually clicks the link, use feels like it loads faster.

Now, Google has added it in the stable release of Chrome, which will be downloaded masses. Now, as developers, how can we utilize this wisely and still save bandwidth.

First, we need to tell Chrome which links to prerender. For this, you just need to add this line on your HEAD tag.
[code] [/code]

Here is a WordPress plugin which does this out of the box for you.

Negative effects if you enable Prerendering

No questions, its so cool for the visitors to get pages load faster. But it eats up their bandwidth uselessly unless they want to click on another link.
Now whats bad for the developer / site owner ?

1. It loads pages un-necessarily, which wastes server resource and band width.
2. Users may see not so updated page if you have real time data on your page. Because what user will see is data already loaded
3. DOM based JS layouting may have trouble ( atleast for now, some websites may break )
4. Analytics Data may get messed – Google says that any page Analytics may count prerendering as a pageview. It was a small amount earlier, but now Prerendering is spread through Chrome stable release. Lets hope Google Analytics Team will come up with a solution.
5. Be prepared with a good web hosting packages to get more visits on to your site. I mean just hists, not visits though 🙂

Keep watching this space to get updated on this matter.