The navigation timing API includes the type of the current navigation
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Paul Calvano has written an excellent article diving into back/forward caches in which he goes into RUM metrics gathered with mPulse.
I've learned that you can access user navigation behavior info in JavaScript. You can see if your users navigated, reloaded or traversed the browser history. The Navigation Timing spec and the included Navigation Type hold this information in performance. performance returns an enum value.
| Navigation Event | Enum value | Info |
|---|---|---|
navigate | 0 | lick click, entering of a URL, form submission, ... |
reload | 1 | reload click or location |
back_forward | 2 | back/forward click or calling history |
prerender | 3 | navigation initiated by a prerender hint |
Use performance to analyze how your site and its resources load depending on different user behavior. For example, if you want to learn how many people hit the reload button on your pages to perform some analysis, a few lines of JavaScript can help here:
if (performance.navigation.type === 1) {
// gather metrics after a reload and
// tell your monitoring service about it!
}
If you want to see the Navigation Timing API in action, I published a CodeSandbox to play around with it.
Have fun! 👋
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Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.