We implemented speculative prerendering to speed up load times in the builder, and the results are going to blow you away. We want the Divi 5 building experience to be fast, faster than any other builder.
The only thing faster than fast is instant, and with speculative prerendering, that’s exactly what you get. Instant load times when entering, exiting, and switching pages in the builder.
For Divi Pros who spend all day bouncing in and out of the builder, this quality-of-life improvement really adds up.
There’s much to explore, so let me jump into the builder and give you the full, off-the-cuff tour. 👇
Speculative Prerendering
⚠️ Note: The speculation API is supported by Chromium browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, Opera, and many others. Safari and Firerox have not implemented it yet. Unfortunately, users of those browsers will have to wait to benefit from this update.
What is speculative prerendering? Long story short: Divi 5 predicts where you are navigating to based on your mouse movements, and prerenders the destination before you click. By the time you click, the page will already be fully loaded. From your perspective, the page loads instantly because it has already finished loading in the background.
Divi only prerenders destinations within its own domain. You’ll notice instant load times when entering, exiting, and switching to different pages in the builder. Since Divi owns the entire editing experience, we can be “greedy” with prerenders since there are so few entry and exit points. If you spend your time in the builder and use the Page Manager and Command Center to navigate, your entire website-building experience becomes instant!
Enter And Exit The Builder Instantly
Here’s how it works. There are a few places you can enter the builder. One of those is on the front end using the Edit With Divi button in the admin bar. As shown in the video below, when your mouse approaches the button, Divi starts prerendering the builder. When the button is clicked, the builder loads instantly.
Furthermore, as you exit the builder, the exit destinations are also prerendered. You can bounce back and forth between the builder, the WordPress Editor, and the front end without any delay whatsoever.
We built prerendering into the Command Center. Press Cmd+K to open the command center, then type a destination. As soon as your navigation command is active, prerending begins. By the time you press enter, the page has already loaded and appears instantly!
It’s Still Useful On Slow Websites
Let’s consider this scenario. You are on some really bad hosting, and it takes 5 seconds to load the builder. When you move your mouse towards the Edit With Divi button, it starts prerendering 1.5 seconds before you click it. In this case, the load time will not be instant, but it will still shave 1.5 seconds off the 5-second load time. Your Divi building experience just got 30% faster; that’s still pretty nice!
You Can Turn It On Or Off
If you would rather not have a few extra requests loading in the background, you can disable prerendering in the builder settings.
Each prerender is like a visitor visiting a page on your website, so if you are concerned about server resources and don’t mind longer load times, you can disable prerendering.
Try Divi 5 Today
The new Command Center is now available for Divi 5. Give it a try and let us know your thoughts.
We rebuilt Divi from the ground up and packed it full of dozens of your most requested features. Forget everything you thought you knew about Divi, because Divi 5 is an entirely different beast.
Have You Tried The New Divi 5 Command Center?
In case you missed it, we recently released The Command Center for Divi 5. Mastering it feels like unlocking a superpower, giving the term’ power user’ true meaning.
You can quickly execute commands such as adding elements, navigating your website, jumping to specific settings, opening panels, and more.
Watch this video for all the details. 👇
More Divi 5 Updates Are On The Way
The features keep coming, and we aren’t slowing down anytime soon!
If you are enjoying these updates, do us a huge favor and let us know by liking this video and leaving a comment. It means a lot to us to see you cheering Divi on, and it’s essential to feed the algorithm and spread the word.
Don’t forget to follow us on YouTube and subscribe to the Divi newsletter so you never miss an update. I’ll see you soon for another Divi 5 feature announcement, which I promise will be right around the corner. 😁
Hi Nick,
Would you be able to expand a bit on this entry in the 9.2 release changelog?
“Improved localization with higher quality translations for all supported locales.”
Dave