Flying Pages is a free WordPress javascript plugin that will make your pages load fast.
It is also developed by Gijo Varghese who developed Flying Images.
Firstly understand the functioning of Flying Pages:
It utilizes preloading similar to Quicklink Javascript. When you implement Flying Pages and as soon as you hover the cursor on any internal links, the page resources including the CSS and images download in the background.
Your browsers then store them in temporary files, and as soon as you click on the link, the web pages load super fast. This happens because all the heavy resources for the page have been downloaded already.
That means Flying Pages loads the web page even before a user clicks on the link. Making the pages load almost instantly.
However, it doesn’t work on cross-domain. Which means only internal web pages preload upon hovering the cursor.
Also note, to use Flying Pages, your website should be on HTTPS. The plugin isn’t compatible with HTTP unsecured domains.
Most of the WordPress developers are using plugins like Autoptimize to reduce web page loading time. You don’t need to delete other speed optimization plugins, Flying Pages can be used with them as well.
It’s a rare case you’ll see any conflict between Flying Pages and another plugin.
The good part about Flying Pages javascript is it makes pages superfast, making users with slow internet speed happy. Fortunately, to implement it in WordPress websites, there are multiple plugins.
But Quicklink plugins are notorious for eating server resources and causing downtimes, mostly on shared hosting.
What happens with other Quicklink plugins is they have no cap on how many links are preloaded as soon as at once.
Let’s say if 100 people are checking a page with 10 links, servers would have to handle 1,000 requests at once. It would create an absurd server load for high traffic websites and web hosting services.
So Flying Pages has an option to configure the preload settings.
Depending upon your server capabilities and requirement you can change the number of preloaded pages and hover time before preloading starts.
There are a few reasons why Flying Pages is better than it’s competitors, such as Instant.Page which I was using before.
- Server crash detection – Flying Pages tops preloading if there is a server overage, or there’s a heavy load.
- Delayed preload – you can adjust specific hover time that triggers preloading.
- Preload happens only on mouse hover but there is a limit on how many preloads occur per second. (Max load per second)
- Its the only plugin that has a configuration menu inside the WordPress dashboard.
- Supports Safari, Chrome and Mozilla browsers.
Flying Pages also supports CDN pre-caching. I tested it on Cloudflare, WPX cloud and Kinsta CDN and it works fine on all.
There’s another interesting feature that detects the network connection of the users. If someone has a slow connection or is using a data saver (chrome lite), Flying Pages will not preload any page in that case.
Then there’s an option to ignore as many keywords you want. The keywords here mean the URL slugs such as /login. Here’s an image for reference:
You can also set if the preloading for logged-on administrators of the website. This does help to reduce server load as WordPress plugins don’t generally serve cache files to admins.
Along with Flying Pages, you should be using a cache plugin. It does increase server load for a moment, and that’s when you’ll appreciate pre-caching and having a good web hosting.
Simply install the Flying Pages plugin and you’re good to go because it works as soon as you activate it. Without any additional configurations.
Now that you know Flying Pages is a beginner-friendly way to reduce the loading time between internal web pages. You should give it a try. It will surely help you deliver a better user experience to your website & blog visitors.
Hi, Aayush,
Thanks for the thorough review of the Flaying pages WordPress plugin.
Honestly, I had it installed on one of my blogs about two weeks ago but had to deactivate and uninstall some moments later. I couldn’t see much of the impact on my blog performance but after reading through your post here, I guess I didn’t configure it better to have a positive effect on page speed.
I will give it a try again, and follow your tips here.
Thanks for sharing, Aayush.