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
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fix Anchor URLs Using MooTools 1.2

    The administrative control panel I build for my customers features FCKEditor, a powerful WYSIWYG editor that allows the customer to add links, bold text, create ordered lists, and so on. I provide training and documentation to the customers but many times they simply forget to...

  • By
    Add Site Screenshots for External Links Using MooTools Tooltips

    Before you send your user to an unknown external website, why not provide them a screenshot of the site via a tooltip so they may preview the upcoming page? Here's how you can do just that using MooTools. The MooTools JavaScript The first step is to grab...

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!