Is it a good idea to prefetch the homepage?

Question

With so many visitors coming from search or social media, the homepage is obviously not the first things they see on most websites. And while some hit the home button - maybe 1 in 10 - most don't, they either click on a link or the back button.

For those who do click on the homepage, it would be great if it would load faster, so rel="prefetch" looks like a home run (ignore the pun). There's a much better chance that the hp actually gets to be seen.

However, as homepages tend to be rather bulky, there's a lot of bandwidth required in the process. With fixed connections this may not be much of a problem, but how about mobile? It does seem bad etiquette (to say the least) to load a reader's internet connection much more than strictly necessary.

How do mobile browsers deal with prefetch? Do they execute it at all? Do they make a difference between wifi and data plan? Or, simply put, should this be done or rather left out?

Answer 1

A good article to read on this topic is: Link Prefetching FAQ

Another possibility that may help is setting up caching in general using the .htaccess file:

# Allows and Expires Caching
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>