How to pre-load the client for even better
loading performance

The user perceives a faster speed and an even smoother interaction,
and it might be possible that we even beat the performance of your own Shop / Website

Advantages of pre-loading:

• even faster loading performance - the perceived loading performance can get close to some milliseconds only
• even smoother user experience since views are dynamically switched within your Website instead of entire page reloads
• this means you can fully benefit of excentos Single Page App advantages (only load parts of the DOM that actually changed) already from the first moment of interaction with the Product Guide

In every context where it's most likely that users afterwards visit the Product Guide

Pre-loading is a trade-off between loading performance and optimized customer journey. It makes sense in a context whereafter the user can only (or most probably) use the Product Guide.
Thus, use pre-loading for:

• dedicated Product Guide Landing Pages: users are most likely to afterwards enter the Product Guide
• product overview pages or product series pages with strong linking into the Product Guide: users are somewhat likely to afterwards enter the Product Guide

Technically, you can also enable pre-loading for the following, but please consider the consequences:

• menu items e.g. "Product Guide". However if this menu item links to a subsequent Landing Page listing all your Product Guides, it makes more sense to allocate a pre-loading command in the Landing Page instead "on menu hover"
• or only certain product categories / content areas
• or your entire Website. However only do this if the probability is high enough for the majority of your users that they will actually visit the Product Guides

Define a concept of Landing and Integration Pages
and integrate the loader-codesnippet already in the Landing Page

It's very easy to enable pre-loading - there is 2 most recommended options:

• integrate the loader-codesnippet into your Product Guide Landing pages
• if you directly link into Integration Pages (e.g. from a menu item) instead of Landing Pages, consider displaying a Welcome Message in the Integration Page.
  The Welcome Message can also be a call to action to answer the first question - hand over the answer to excentos via a parameter when actually displaying the Product Guide.

Please refer to the project-specific site integration docu that excentos will hand over to you for loader-codesnippet and how to diplay a Welcome Message.

Don't over-optimize pre-loading

Please keep in mind that users won't appreciate pre-loading if not required. Please don't overoptimize pre-loading, e.g. hiding every Integration Page behind less useful Landing Pages. That's why excentos advices you not to use pre-loading in the following contexts:

• avoid useless Landing Pages, e.g. user clicks on menu item "bike advisor" and expects to get directly into the bike advisor. The only thing we should show here is the Product Guide (i.e. link into the Integration Page and not into the Landing Page)
• less than say 30% chance of Product Guide visit, e.g. you have a menu item called "Services" with 3 follow-up actions (e.g. Dealer Contact, Download Operating Manuals, Product Guide). If the Product Guide only accounts for 30% of the traffic and you use pre-loading, 70% of the users will load the excentos Client without actually needing it
  (however if the probability is high that they'll browse products afterwards and will get in touch with the Product Guide again, pre-loading might still make sense)

Depending on the user's web browser and cache settings, the effect of pre-loading may be lost if the user does not visit the Integration Page / Product Guide directly afterwards, but browses to another site.

Discuss your pre-loading concept with excentos

Your excentos Consultant and Project Manager is there to help. Let's discuss whether and where pre-loading is necessary.

Pre-loading in a page where the Product Guide is not yet displayeed is only beneficial if the user has caching enabled;
however this is the case for almost every user

Pre-loading loads the Client's Javascript code into the browser's cache. If the user switches to another page and has all caching options of his web-browser deactivated, the loaded Javascript code will be garbaged.
User's with caching deactivated will thus load the Javascript code twice.
Fortunately, the vast majority of users has cache enabled and thus deactivates caches don't influence our pre-loading strategy.