It makes a big difference and doesn't only help websites that take seconds to load.
Just look at its hover->click speed demo on the landing page. I'm getting 500ms+ if I click it casually like I do most links. All of that time could be spent loading the next page.
https://dev.to/ (blog platform) does prefetching to great effect.
The onus is on you to decide if this would create a bunch of false positive prefetches for your desktop users, like if your website was a bunch of densely packed links. You could also scope this to prefetch only a subset of links.
But your users deserve more deliberation over their UX than a kneejerk yay/nay.
Just look at its hover->click speed demo on the landing page. I'm getting 500ms+ if I click it casually like I do most links. All of that time could be spent loading the next page.
https://dev.to/ (blog platform) does prefetching to great effect.
The onus is on you to decide if this would create a bunch of false positive prefetches for your desktop users, like if your website was a bunch of densely packed links. You could also scope this to prefetch only a subset of links.
But your users deserve more deliberation over their UX than a kneejerk yay/nay.