Two years ago today, on May 22, 2023, I opened an experimental pull request for a new module in the Performance Lab plugin. That little experiment was the very first step on a long road that ultimately led to the “Speculative Loading” feature landing in WordPress 6.8 last month (April 2025).
For those unfamiliar, the Speculative Loading feature enhances performance by speculatively loading pages a user is likely to visit next, which can make navigation feel almost instantaneous. If you want to dive into the technical nitty-gritty, I recommend checking out the “dev note” post on Make WordPress Core.
This post, however, isn’t about the what or how of the feature itself. Instead, I want to pull back the curtain and share the story behind the feature—the milestones, the discussions, and the collaborative effort that took it from a spark of an idea to a reality for millions of WordPress sites. The impact is considerable even for the entire web. Keep reading to the end for concrete numbers. 👇