Introducing Speed Brain: helping web pages load 45% faster

Summary

Each time a user visits your web page, they are initiating a race to receive content as quickly as possible. Performance is a critical factor that influences how visitors interact with your site. Some might think that moving content across the globe introduces significant latency, but for a while, network transmission speeds have approached their theoretical limits. To put this into perspective, data on Cloudflare can traverse the 11,000 kilometer round trip between New York and London in about 76 milliseconds – faster than the blink of an eye.However, delays in loading web pages persist due to the complexities of processing requests, responses, and configurations. In addition to pushing advancements in connection establishment, compression, hardware, and software, we have built a new way to reduce page load latency by anticipating how visitors will interact with a given web page. Today we are very excited to share the latest leap forward in speed: Speed Brain. It relies on the Speculation Rules API to prefetch the content of the user's likely next navigations. The main goal of Speed Brain is to download a web page to the browser cache before a user navigates to it, allowing pages to load almost instantly when the actual navigation takes place. Our initial approach uses a conservative model that prefetches static content for the next page when a user starts a touch or click event. Through the fourth quarter of 2024 and into 2025, we will offer more aggressive speculation models, such as speculatively prerendering (not just fetching the page before the navigation happens but rendering it completely) for an even faster experience. Eventually, Speed Brain will learn how to eliminate latency for your static website, without any configuration, and work with browsers to make sure that it loads as fast as possible. To illustrate, imagine an ecommerce website selling clothing. Using the insights from our global request logs, we can predict with high accuracy that a typical ...