I often get into some fringe areas of micro-optimizations of website performance, DNS prefetching is another one of those topics.
To understand how this can help, you must first understand the underlying concepts that are used within the communications used to build your web page.
The first of these is a “DNS Lookup”, where the domain name (www.example.com) is converted into a numerical address, the IP address of the server that contains the file(s).
In many websites, content is included from other domains for performance or security purposes.
When the domain names are known in advance, this approach can save time on the connection as the lookup can fetched in advance, before it is required on the page to retrieve assets.
This can be particularly useful for users with slow connections, such as those on mobile browsers.
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//www.example.com" />
- MSIE9+ (MSIE10+ as dns-prefetch)/Edge