Speculative Loading, or A Brief History of Landing a Performance Feature in WordPress Core

Two years ago today, on May 22, 2023, I opened an experimental pull request for a new module in the Performance Lab plugin. That little experiment was the very first step on a long road that ultimately led to the Speculative Loading feature landing in WordPress 6.8 last month (April 2025). For those unfamiliar, the [ ] The post Speculative Loading, or A Brief History of Landing a Performance…