Optimizing a website load time has become essential factor for all website owners aiming to provide best user experience and improve SEO ranking, in this article we will be fixing the Preload Key Request error appearing on Google PageSpeed Insights for WordPress Websites.

What Does “Preload Key Request” Means

Preload, as the name indicates, inform the browser to start caching the resources on a webpage immediately when the page starts loading. This will help to cache the CSS, scripts and fonts that are required later.

You can learn more about Preload Key Request in the lighthouse web.dev Article.

How to solve “Preload Key Request”

In this article we will be working on fixing preload request for a font .woff2 file.

1- Analyse your website using Google PageSpeed Insights

First things first, analyse your website to see if there are files that needs to be preloaded, if found than go to next step.

2- Copy the link address of the fonts to preload

Now copy the link address of the font and make sure it’s ending by .woff2

and than we will use the following snippet of code to solve the issue, all you need to change about is replacing font path with link you’ve just coppied

<link rel=”preload” href=”FONT PATH” as=”font” type=”font/woff” crossorigin>

3- Past the snippet in you header.php before the head end tag </head>

Go to your WordPress Dashboard -> Appearance -> Theme Editor

Than find your header.php in the code of the header find the end tag of head </head> and past the snippet before it the same way in the following image

and click on update file, wait untill you see ‘File updated successfully’ the problem of Preload Key Requests should be resolved, but to make sure retest the website on Google PageSpeed Insights. you can also follow this steps if you prefer to watch a video.