14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced that it will start using its pre-rendering technology in Chrome more often, as it's now more confident in its efficacy. It announced this on its webmasters blog since these are the people that are going to be the most affected by the move.
Pre-rendering, like the name suggests, starts loading a page before a user requests it explicitly, i.e. clicks on a link.
This means that the page's assets are being requested and scripts start to run well ahead of the user doing anything. But that also means that the user may not end up clicking on that link, creating problems for websites.
Google says that in its testing, the feature has been enabled for many months now, it found it to be quite reliable and it’s starting to use it more.
What this means is that Chrome will start pre-loading websites even in cases where it's not as sure they're what the user plans to visit next.
"We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature," Google wrote.
"About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part," Google explained.
Google says there's nothing to worry about, most websites don't have to do anything for the feature to work. But just in case there are problems or you want to make sure your site works, you can find out how to trigger the feature here.
Of course, webmasters aren't worried that the feature doesn't work, they're worried it does work and it messes with their analytics and increases their bandwidth bill. As far as analytics is concerned, the Webmaster Tools site will account for the feature and so will any analytics script as long as it uses the Page Visibility API.