How to add resource hints
Tell the browser what to fetch before it discovers it needs to — preload your hero image, warm up font connections, and predict the visitor's next page.
A browser discovers what a page needs by reading it top to bottom. Your hero image sits in the markup; the font it needs comes from a stylesheet it hasn’t parsed yet. Resource hints short-circuit that discovery — they tell the browser up front what’s coming, so fetching starts earlier than it otherwise could.
Where to find it
- In your WordPress admin, click xSpeed Cache in the left menu.
- In the xSpeed Cache sidebar, open the Optimization group.
- Click the Resource Hints card.
Shortcut: open
wp-admin/admin.php?page=xspeed#/performance/resource-hintsdirectly.✅ This panel is part of xSpeed Cache (Free). Its SmartPredict tab is ⭐ Pro.
Tabs on this panel
| Tab | Feature | Tier | Guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hints | Preload the LCP image, preconnect to font hosts | Free | How to preload your hero image |
| SmartPredict | Speculation rules that prefetch the likely next page | ⭐ Pro | How to prefetch the next page |
Each tab has its own address, so you can link straight to one:
| Tab | URL |
|---|---|
| Hints | #/performance/resource-hints |
| SmartPredict | #/performance/resource-hints/speculation |
Which one should you use?
Both make the browser fetch earlier, but they operate on different timescales.
| Hints | SmartPredict | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | The page being loaded now | The page the visitor might go to next |
| What it speeds up | First paint, Largest Contentful Paint | The next navigation |
| Risk | Very low — the defaults ship on | Moderate — fetches pages nobody may visit |
| Tier | Free | ⭐ Pro |
Hints is on by default and needs no thought. It’s the rare setting that’s safe, useful, and requires no configuration — the panel calls its defaults “safe, no-config optimizations that help every theme.”
SmartPredict is a different bet: it spends bandwidth now on a page the visitor probably wants, to make that navigation feel instant. Worth it on sites with predictable journeys; wasteful on sites where visitors scatter.