What is Instant Navigation
Instant Navigation makes your Shopify store feel significantly faster by pre-loading pages before customers click on links. When a shopper clicks a pre-loaded link, the page opens almost instantly, creating a smooth and seamless browsing experience. This helps your store feel more responsive and app-like, especially when customers move between products, collections, and pages.
How Instant Navigation works
Instant Navigation uses modern browser technology to safely preload likely next pages in the background. InstaIndex applies Shopify-specific optimizations so only relevant pages are prepared, avoiding unnecessary data usage.
Pages are preloaded only when there is a strong signal that a customer may visit them, such as hovering over a link or starting a tap.
Benefits of Instant Navigation
• Faster, smoother page transitions
• Improved customer browsing experience
• Reduced bounce rates
• Better Core Web Vitals scores, supporting SEO
• No wasted loading on pages customers don’t visit
Browser support
Instant Navigation works in Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers, which account for roughly 70–75% of web users. For other browsers, your store continues to work normally without any negative impact.
Enabling or Disabling Instant Navigation
You can turn Instant Navigation on or off using the toggle at the top of the settings page.
Support page types
You can choose to preload the homepage, collections, products, pages, and blogs. For most stores, enabling all page types works best, but you can adjust this anytime.
Prerender Eagerness
Choose how aggressively browsers should preload pages:
• Immediate – Fastest experience with higher resource usage
• Moderate (Recommended) – Balanced speed and efficiency for most Shopify stores.
• Conservative – Minimal resource usage for heavier pages or low-end devices
We recommend enabling all page types for most stores, but you can customize this based on your store’s structure and performance needs.
Learn more in this article : FAQs about Instant Navigation