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
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • 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
    Introducing MooTools Dotter

    It's best practice to provide an indicator of some sort when performing an AJAX request or processing that takes place in the background. Since the dawn of AJAX, we've been using colorful spinners and imagery as indicators. While I enjoy those images, I am...

  • By
    CSS Kwicks

    One of the effects that made me excited about client side and JavaScript was the Kwicks effect.  Take a list of items and react to them accordingly when hovered.  Simple, sweet.  The effect was originally created with JavaScript but come five years later, our...

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!