Cloudflare Boosts Web Speeds With Predictive Site Loading

Cloudflare has introduced major advancements that promise to significantly enhance the speed and privacy of the web for everyday users. The internet giant announced the release of Speed Brain, Zstandard compression, and also the rollout of Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), all together reshaping how websites load and secure connections, offering faster, more seamless browsing while improving user privacy.

Speed Brain: predicting what users will click on next

Cloudflare’s Speed Brain is set to improve how quickly web pages load by anticipating a user’s next actions and prefetching content. It uses the emerging Speculation Rules API, allowing websites to download and store content in the browser cache before the user even clicks on a link. This means that when a user navigates to a new page, it will load almost instantly.

For instance, on an e-commerce site, if a user is browsing a “Men > Clothes” section, Speed Brain can predict that the next likely click will be on “Shirts” and start loading images and content for that page. Early tests have shown up to 45% reductions in page load times on successful prefetches, and Cloudflare plans to roll out even more aggressive models to further enhance speed.

• Prefetching happens conservatively — triggered only when a user hovers over or clicks a link — minimizing the risk of wasting resources.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a core metric for measuring website performance, has improved by up to 75% in lab tests under this system.

This technology is already enabled by default for free Cloudflare domains and can be manually activated for Pro, Business, and Enterprise users. As a result, websites using Cloudflare's network can expect faster load times without requiring any manual setup or modifications.

Zstandard compression: speeding up the web

Alongside Speed Brain, Cloudflare is introducing Zstandard (zstd) compression, an advanced compression algorithm that compresses data 42% faster than Brotli while maintaining near-equal compression ratios. This means that web pages will not only load quicker but also transmit less data, reducing bandwidth usage.

For internet users, this translates into a faster and more efficient browsing experience, especially on websites with heavy data loads such as high-resolution images, large JavaScript files, and CSS. Compared to traditional GZIP compression, Zstandard achieves 11.3% better file size reductions, and when combined with its speed, it becomes a powerful tool for accelerating web performance.

• Faster data compression helps websites load more quickly, reducing the time users spend waiting for content to appear.
• This is especially impactful for dynamic content, like frequently updated pages, which require rapid compression and decompression for seamless browsing.

Encrypted Client Hello (ECH): enhanced privacy

Cloudflare is also rolling out Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), a new standard that enhances privacy by preventing intermediaries from seeing which websites users are visiting. ECH encrypts sensitive information during the TLS handshake, which is the process used to establish secure connections. Typically, the Server Name Indication (SNI) — which reveals the website a user is trying to visit — remains exposed in plaintext. ECH solves this by masking the actual website name, ensuring that only the user, the website owner, and Cloudflare know the destination.

This protects user privacy on public networks and prevents ISPs, network administrators, or malicious actors from snooping on web activity.

Cloudflare has enabled ECH by default for free users, while paid customers can turn it on manually, giving millions of users a more private internet experience.