Increase user engagement with lightning-fast website navigation

An ongoing priority for those in the non-profit sector is ensuring our websites remain fast for our users. As activities such as fundraising and campaign awareness remain ever-more important, knowing how a slow website will negatively impact engagement is useful to ensure our campaigns are as effective as possible.

Improving a website’s performance is an in-depth and complicated topic, and typically it makes sense to tackle improvements that can be achieved in the quickest time whilst yielding the biggest impact, and this is where Instant.page comes in.

Instant.page is a lightweight WordPress plugin that makes navigating around a website lightning fast! It achieves this by detecting when a user is about to navigate to a new page and preloads it just before they click/tap the link. It’ll feel like magic for the user, and the quick page transition will help increase user engagement within your website.

Rewarding users with perceived performance

We call this type of improvement “perceived performance”, the page wasn’t any faster for WordPress to generate, but because the browser has pre-fetched it the user felt the benefit of an instant page transition, and you’ll benefit from higher engagement and conversion rates.

Before a user clicks on a link, they hover their mouse over that link. When a user has hovered for 65 ms there is one chance out of two that they will click on that link, so instant.page starts preloading at this moment, leaving on average over 300 ms for the page to preload.

Instant.page

Instant.page and your performance strategy

While Instant.page is very good at solving one specific problem, it should be considered a small part of a wider performance strategy.

This mechanism isn’t going to make your page any faster to load for the first view, so users surfing in from Google, social media or a direct link will experience your website performance for what it really is, and if your pages are slow to load then this will still be an issue to overcome.

Instant.page also only pre-loads the page itself, and not any other assets a page needs, such as images, fonts, styles etc. Ensuring assets are quick to load and cached appropriately will also help greatly.

You can see here how Instant.page complements your wider performance strategy. We’re here to help if you’re unsure how well your website is performing, or if you need guidance setting and achieving performance targets, reach out to book a discovery call to level up your organisation.

Want to see how well Instant.page works? Click around this website and notice how quickly each page displays.