Having a fast, responsive website is key to maintaining a successful web presence and online business.
Even as sites become more resource-intensive and complex, visitors are seeking an increasingly smoother, more streamlined experience. Slow load times and lackluster performance can lead to frustrated customers, higher bounce rates, and lost revenue.
This is where Early Hints comes in.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro or are just getting started in web development, your site, no matter the size, can benefit greatly from this new feature.
Early Hints: A New Web Standard for Improved Page-Rendering Speed
“Early Hints” is a modern web standard that can help immediately improve how quickly your pages load by providing additional information on what resources to preload, resulting in faster page rendering speed.
Specifically, Early Hints defines a new 103 HTTP status code that suggests to a client what resources it may need to prepare before the main response is delivered by specifying rel=preload HTTP headers.
By adopting “server think time,” Early Hints permits servers to communicate information about linked assets to your visitor’s browser before a page has fully loaded. This gives the browser a chance to download certain resources in advance of, or in parallel with, others.