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
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    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

  • By
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

  • By
    Scrolling &#8220;Go To Top&#8221; Link Using Dojo

    One of the most popular code snippets of posted on my blog has been the scrolling "Go To Top" link snippet. The premise of the snippet is simple: once the user scrolls an element (usually the BODY element) past a given threshold, a "Go...

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!