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InstantClick — Pre-loads pages your website visitors are likely to click on
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@rrhoover You can try it out on your site without installing anything, just click the big CTA on the page.
@rrhoover I had similar feelings before I tried it myself. However, this demo (http://instantclick.io/click-test) really drives home how long it really does take. For small targets like links, it’s often longer than you think. Buttons and larger click targets it can be a little less, but also remember that often only one request is being made for the string contents of the HTML page you would be taken to since most-if-not-all of the CSS and JS resources required for the next page will be the same as those on the current page (and therefore not requested again).
InstantClick intelligently preloads links that your visitors are likely to click on.Before visitors click on a link, they hover over that link. InstantClick makes use of that time to preload the page, so that the it’s is already there by the time they click.
I remember seeing a similar project with the same name a while ago on GitHub: instantclick.io. I wonder whether the two of them are related?
@AsadDhamani Hey Asad, they absolutely are. Technically one is a fork of the other, but essentially they are the same project. If you want to get into the details, keep reading (apologies for the jargon ;).
The page linked here (https://eager.io/app/ZYBle8qUhKFJ), although it perhaps looks like the website for InstantClick, is actually just the app page for the InstantClick app in the Eager App Store (https://eager.io/apps).
At the top of the page you’ll see it says “By Alex Dieulot” and at the bottom of the page under “Information”, there’s both a link to the website for the project (http://instantclick.io, under “App website”) and the GitHub repo for the app. The repo is https://github.com/EagerApps/ins..., a fork of https://github.com/dieulot/insta... which has a few modifications/improvements, some of which we’ve PRd back into the upstream (https://github.com/dieulot/insta...).
This is pretty cool. I think I'm gonna have to give this a try. I'm assuming it will work just fine with my CDN right?
@jadlimcaco You can try it on your site without installing anything by clicking the "Try" button in the middle of the linked page. Navigate around a bit to see if there are any issues.
Really like the concept.. To clarify, you preload on hover? I have to imagine users don't hover that long (I know I don't). Wouldn't it make sense to tie into analytics and preload the link(s) most clicked from that page?
@yo Zack from Eager here, we didn't create InstantClick but I do know a bit about it. The 300ms of hovering is surprisingly helpful in making the site faster. When it comes time to transition, it doesn't actually swap out the whole page, just the body, and diffs everything in the head. This also makes the transition a bit faster.
Modern browsers like Chrome actually have a prefetch capability that does use historical browsing (and an optional meta header) to fetch the 'next page' you might want to see in advance.
@yo http://instantclick.io/click-test gives you a great demo of how long it really does take.
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