Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Prevent WordPress from Loading “Next” Pages

By  on  

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.

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Clearable TextBox with the Dojo Toolkit

    Usability is a key feature when creating user interfaces;  it's all in the details.  I was recently using my iPhone and it dawned on my how awesome the "x" icon is in its input elements.  No holding the delete key down.  No pressing it a...

  • By
    Reverse Element Order with CSS Flexbox

    CSS is becoming more and more powerful these days, almost to the point where the order of HTML elements output to the page no longer matters from a display standpoint -- CSS lets you do so much that almost any layout, large or small, is possible.  Semantics...

Discussion

  1. 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.

  2. Kokoen

    I didn’t know that WordPress function neither. Good to know!

  3. Vincent

    These actions are now deprecated. Use:

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

    instead!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!