I just logged in today under one of the Optimization features you get with any of the paid plans and I saw a new feature,
called "Speed Brain",
"that apparently leverages the Speculative rules API to make your site much faster." !! What does that even mean in English ?
I have not yet tested it, but as it applies to WORDPRESS, has anyone used it and what are the results and issues that arise as a result ? If any ?
Because honestly, the fastest way To wreck your WordPress website, is to leverage some of the
" Optimization Features they offer"
So very curious to see what this is all about?
I tested Speed Brain on one of my portfolio sites out of curiosity – From what I understand, it uses Cloudflare’s Speculative Rules API to predict user behavior and pre-load resources in advance. However, the site I tested was already performing well in terms of page speed so the improvement in load time was minute.
I initially thought this sounded similar to WP Rocket’s prefetch feature but leared some differences as I played along with this feature:
WP Rocket’s Prefetch: It’s more straightforward. It prefetches DNS and preloads links that are directly visible on your site, which helps speed up subsequent page loads by reducing DNS lookup times and preconnecting to external resources.
Cloudflare’s Speed Brain: This is a bit more advanced. It doesn’t just preload resources that are visible; it tries to anticipate what a user might do next on any part of your site and loads those resources preemptively. It’s more of a predictive approach and operates at the CDN level, which means it can optimize loading even before requests hit your server.
Speculative rules API is a new browser feature, similar to preload/prefetch.
Cloudflare adds these rules to the header it seems to tell the browser to preload links on a page. So when a user clicks a link the browser will already have downloaded it, allowing it to render almost instantly.
This could cause issues if not properly configured though, such as unintentally removing/adding items to a cart if those links are preloaded.
There is a plugin for this which will be better suited to WordPress:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/speculation-rules/