With a new web standard called Early Hints, Cloudflare will boost millions of websites. This technology, only available in beta, promises that websites will load 30% faster. Explanations.
This Thursday, September 16, 2021, Cloudflare, the US web host, has announced support for Early hints, a technology designed to speed up the loading of websites, on its servers. Early Hints is a new web protocol. In a blog post, Cloudflare boasts of being the first web host to add this technology.
“Early Hints significantly improves the loading performance of browser pages. […] In the first tests using Early Hints, we observed a more than 30% improvement in page load times for browsers visiting a website for the first time ”, details Cloudflare.
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How will Cloudflare speed up the loading of websites?
The company did not hesitate to detail how Early Hints works. To load a web page, your browser, whether Safari, Chrome or Microsoft Edge, must obtain a series of instructions from a web server. These instructions tell the browser what images and text to display on the screen. In order to reduce the loading time of websites, Cloudflare will transmit information, called “Early advice”, directly to the browser while the server loads the instructions.
“By sending these tips to a browser before the full response is prepared, the browser can determine what it needs to do to load the web page faster”, details the host. To develop the integration of this technology, Cloudflare worked hand in hand with web browser developers.
From now, Eary Hints is offered in beta to all Cloudflare customers. The administrator of a website is invited to activate the option by going to the dashboard offered by the host. Best of all, support for this technology is completely free. “Everyone should have the fastest and most reliable Internet access possible and we have built our global network to be able to provide it. Now we take it a step further and work with major browsers to speed up millions of your favorite websites and apps, completely for free ”, says Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.