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Prevent WordPress from Loading “Next” Pages

By David Walsh on August 25, 2015

I've been working to make this blog more performant by lazy loading everything I can think of, placing CSS and JavaScript into the HTML, and using data URIs; the common theme in these is reducing the number of requests on each page. One request I noticed (and hadn't anticipated) coming from WordPress looked like this:

<link rel="next" href="https://davidwalsh.name/page/2/" />

Wordpress was essentially preloading the second listing page of my blog, assuming that people would click a link to page 2. When looking at my blog stats, that was very rarely the case (probably because I list 15 items on the homepage, which is a lot), so why bother sending the request at all? This bit of WordPress magic will prevent that LINK element from being used:

// ... in functions.php...

// Prevent unwanted next and prev link downloads
if(function_exists('remove_action')) { 
	remove_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
	remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link', 10, 0); 
}

There are two function calls removed -- one to prevent the tag from being used on the homepage/listing pages, and the other used on single blog posts. Of course removing this call isn't for everyone but since I'm trying to micro-optimize the site, I thought I'd cut it out.

Recent Features

By David WalshAugust 29, 2011
Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
By David WalshApril 3, 2013
CSS @supports
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

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dwProgressBar v2: Stepping and Events
dwProgressBar was a huge hit when it debuted. For those of you who didn't catch my first post, dwProgressBar is a MooTools 1.2-based progress bar which allows for as much flexibility as possible. Every piece of dwProgressBar can be controlled by CSS...
By David WalshApril 3, 2013
CSS @supports
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we...

Discussion

Mark Howells-Mead
Google indicates a couple of reasons why the links are relevant to their search indices at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html.
Kokoen
I didn’t know that WordPress function neither. Good to know!

Vincent

These actions are now deprecated. Use:

remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link', 10, 0);

instead!