Prerender pages in Chrome for instant page navigations

Barry Pollard

Published: December 2, 2022, Last updated: January 23, 2026

The Chrome team has brought back full prerendering of future pages that a user is likely to navigate to.

A brief history of prerender

In the past, Chrome supported the <link rel="prerender" href="/next-page"> resource hint, however it was not broadly supported beyond Chrome, and it wasn't a very expressive API.

This legacy prerendering using the link rel=prerender hint was deprecated in favor of NoState Prefetch, which instead fetched the resources needed by the future page, but did not fully prerender the page nor execute JavaScript. NoState Prefetch does help improve page performance by improving the resource loading, but won't deliver an instant page load like a full prerender would.

The Chrome team has now reintroduced full prerendering back into Chrome. To avoid complications with existing usage, and to allow for future expansion of prerendering, this new prerender mechanism won't use the <link rel="prerender"...> syntax, which remains in place for NoState Prefetch, with a view of retiring this at some point in the future.

How is a page prerendered?

A page can be prerendered in one of four ways, all of which aim to make navigations quicker:

1. When you type a URL into the Chrome address bar (also known as "the omnibox"), Chrome may automatically prerender the page for you, if it has high confidence you will visit that page, based on your previous browsing history.
2. When you use the bookmarks bar, Chrome may automatically prerender the page for you on holding the pointer over one of the bookmark buttons.
3. When you type a search term into the Chrome address bar, Chrome may automatically prerender the search results page, when instructed to do so by the search engine.
4. Sites can use the Speculation Rules API, to programmatically tell Chrome which pages to prerender. This replaces what <link rel="prerender"...> used to do and allows sites to proactively prerender a page based on speculation rules on the page. These can statically exist on the pages, or be dynamically injected by JavaScript as the page owner sees fit.

In each of these cases, a prerender behaves as if the page has been opened in an invisible background tab, and then is "activated" by replacing the foreground tab with that prerendered page. If a page is activated before it has fully prerendered, then its current state is "foregrounded" and continues to load, which means you can still get a good head start.

As the prerendered page is opened in a hidden state, a number of APIs that cause intrusive behaviors (for example, prompts) are not activated in this state, and are instead delayed until the page is activated. In the small number of cases where this is not yet possible, the prerender is canceled. The Chrome team is working on exposing prerender cancellation reasons as an API, and also enhancing DevTools capabilities to make identifying such edge cases easier.

Impact of prerendering

Prerendering allows a near-instant page load as shown in the following video:

The example site is already a fast site, but even with this you can see how prerendering improves the user experience. This can therefore also have a direct impact on a site's Core Web Vitals, with near zero LCP, reduced CLS (since any load CLS happens before the initial view), and improved INP (since the load should be completed before the user interacts).

Even when a page activates before it is fully loaded, having a head start to the page load, should improve the loading experience. When a link is activated while prerendering is still happening, the prerendering page will move to the main frame and continue loading.

However, prerendering does use additional memory and network bandwidth. Be careful not to over-prerender, at a cost of user resources. Only prerender when there is a high likelihood of the page being navigated to.

See the Measuring performance section for more information on how to measure the actual performance impact in your analytics.

View Chrome's address bar predictions

For the first use case, you can view Chrome's predictions for URLs in the chrome://predictors page: