The Need for Speed
When you navigate to a website like Wikipedia and read an article, your browser is usually sitting idle, waiting for you to click the next link. Google Chrome contains a powerful, hidden feature called “Preload Pages” that utilizes this idle time to make your browsing experience feel significantly faster. When enabled, Chrome uses its advanced algorithms to guess which link you are most likely to click next. While you are still reading the first page, Chrome secretly downloads the text, images, and code for the second page in the background. When you finally click the link, the new page appears instantly, because it was already sitting in your computer’s RAM. If you want maximum browsing speed and aren’t worried about cellular data caps, you should enable this feature.
How to Enable Preload Pages
You can activate this predictive loading technology deep within Chrome’s performance settings.
- Open the Google Chrome desktop browser.
- Click the three vertical dots (⋮) in the top right corner and select Settings.
- In the left-hand sidebar, click on Performance.
- Look for the section labeled Speed.
- Locate the toggle switch for Preload pages and click it to turn it On (blue).
Standard vs. Extended Preloading
Once enabled, you must choose how aggressively Chrome should predict your behavior:
- Standard preloading (Recommended): Chrome will only preload pages that it is absolutely mathematically certain you are going to visit (such as the next page in a multi-page article). It uses very little extra internet data.
- Extended preloading: Chrome will aggressively preload multiple possible links on the page. While this makes browsing feel incredibly fast, it burns through massive amounts of internet bandwidth by downloading dozens of web pages you might never actually click on. Do not use this setting if you are on a metered connection or a mobile hotspot.