How Monrif Improved Engagement by 8.9% and Reduced LCP by 17.9% with Speculation Rules

Learn how Italian media company Monrif used the Speculation Rules API to prerender pages and achieve instant navigation, boosting user engagement across their major publications.

How Monrif Improved Engagement by 8.9% and Reduced LCP by 17.9% with Speculation Rules

The Challenge: Suboptimal LCP on Key Pages

Monrif is an Italian media company operating major publications like Il Resto del Carlino, Il Giorno, and La Nazione. With millions of users and thousands of articles, navigation speed is critical for reader retention.

Before optimization, LCP values on article pages ranged from 2,333ms to 2,419ms - limiting perceived speed when users navigated between articles.

Goal: Improve user retention by making navigation feel instant.

The Solution: Speculation Rules API

The team implemented the Speculation Rules API to prerender article pages before users click on them. This modern API replaces older prefetch methods with more precise control.

Setting Moderate Eagerness

The prerendering trigger was set to "moderate" level:

  • Desktop: Prerender on hover over links
  • Mobile: Based on viewport heuristics (when link becomes visible)

    • ``html

    ``

    Technical Exclusions

    The script was configured to ignore:

  • Links with "nofollow" attribute
  • Links marked with ".no-prerender" class
  • External links

    • This gave precise control over what should be preloaded.

    Results Achieved (Desktop)

    | Publication | LCP Improvement | Engagement Increase |

    |-------------|-----------------|---------------------|

    | Il Resto del Carlino | -17.9% | +6.9% |

    | Il Giorno | -17.1% | +6.7% |

    | La Nazione | -15.0% | +5.3% |

    Peak engagement increase: 8.9% during periods of highest prerender activity (June 2023).

    Correlation Between Performance and Engagement

    The data showed clear correlation:

  • Days with lowest LCP values corresponded to days with highest prerender activity
  • The relationship was consistent across all three publications

    • Additional Benefits: Advertising

    Instant Back Navigation with bfcache

    The team removed "unload" event blockers and implemented Maverick's Permissions-Policy to enable back/forward cache (bfcache). This allowed instant restoration of pages from browser memory.

    Higher Ad Viewability

    Average ad viewability on opened pages improved to 1.03%, increasing advertiser confidence and quality of ad inventory.

    Faster Creative Loading

    Ad creatives loaded within 500ms increased by 10.4% on prerendered desktop pages.

    Key Takeaways

  • Moderate eagerness balances performance gains with resource usage
  • Desktop benefits more from hover-based prerendering than mobile
  • bfcache support is essential for instant back-navigation
  • Ad monetization improves with better Core Web Vitals
  • Gradual rollout recommended: Start with prefetch, then moderate prerender

    • ---

    > Source Attribution: This content is adapted from the case study "How Monrif improved engagement by 8.9% and reduced LCP by 17.9% with Speculation Rules prerender and back/forward cache" published on web.dev under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.