Introducing Smart Preloader: Making frustrating waiting a thing of the past!

Say goodbye to endless wait and blank screens that frustrate your users! It’s now well known that over 50% of users might hop off a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Any delay often leads to lost traffic or your users. Being on a relentless pursuit of a faster internet, we at bunny.net are committed to making this a thing of the past.

The bunny.net network is already one of the fastest in the world, helping supercharge website load times by caching and delivering static content from the edge. However, no matter how fast we can serve the static content, the origin server’s time to generate a dynamic response still affects performance.

Networks and software are never perfect, and even a small blip in the system can turn a potentially great user experience into an unwanted waiting game.

Introducing: Smart Preloader

To combat this, we're excited to announce Smart Preloader, our newest addition to the Bunny Optimizer feature suite. Smart Preloader is designed to tackle these challenging situations when your origin just can't respond fast enough.

While we can't generate the website response ourselves, we can turn these otherwise stressful situations into an opportunity to bring your brand closer to your user.

Instead of keeping your users waiting and staring at a blank screen. Smart Preloader greets them with your branding and a loading animation that reassures them your site is on its way. This not only improves the user experience but also helps you keep your customers on your website.

Bringing Your Brand Closer To Your Users

At bunny.net, we understand just how important of a role branding plays in your business. That's why we designed the Smart Preloader with a clean, simple design, completely focused on your brand.

While we love our bunnies, we kept our own branding out of this page, and let you focus on your brand.

For those seeking an even more seamless branding experience, we also created an option to bring your own preloading page HTML, to keep the look and feel of your site and ensure a genuinely consistent user experience.

Performance First: Almost Zero Overhead

Being a company that's all about performance, we knew it was crucial to make the preloader unobtrusive and not add any further delays to an already frustrating experience.

We're well aware that preloader screens can sometimes cause more frustrations than solutions, so we've made the Smart Preloader strictly show when it needs to, and with close to zero overhead on top of the actual response from your origin.

To achieve that, we integrated Smart Preloader tightly into the bunny.net request processing stack. Instead of returning the preloader before even sending the request to your server, we process each request normally.

It's only when the origin server fails to respond in time, we disconnect the browser from the original request, return the preloading screen to the user, and then immediately reconnect the browser to the exact original request that was sent. As soon as your origin responds, we then replace the loading screen with the response from your web server.

For us, Smart Preloader presented an exciting technological challenge. For curious developers, we're preparing a technical blog post that will go into more detail about how we made it all happen.

Give it a Try!

The Smart Preloader preview is now available as part of the Bunny Optimizer suite for any DNS-accelerated Pull Zone.

Improving your user experience is now just a click away. To help you get started, we've also prepared a knowledge base article that explains in detail how Smart Preloader works and how to configure it for your website.

Help us build a better internet experience!

At bunny.net, we're on a mission to make the internet hop faster, we operate one of the fastest global networks that helps over 1 million websites have a better internet experience. We're obsessed with innovation and looking to continue helping to make the internet a better place. If you connect with our mission, make sure to check out our careers page and join the fluffle!

We're working on many exciting new projects, and we would love to get your help.