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.
As with other forms of asynchronous loading, this can greatly increase response time and significantly reduce latency. In fact, Early Hints users have reported up to a 30% improvement in load times.
What’s more, there’s no fallout if Early Hints doesn’t work as expected. If, for example, a visitor’s browser doesn’t support the web standard, their browser will simply ignore the 103 status code and load the page normally — no harm, no foul.
And this powerful new web standard is now available for all Kinsta-hosted WordPress sites for free!
How To Enable Early Hints at Kinsta
Thanks to Kinsta’s Cloudflare integration, you can enable Early Hints on all your WordPress sites. Here’s how:
- Sign in to your MyKinsta dashboard.
- Navigate to WordPress Sites > sitename > Tools.
- Locate the Early Hints tile, then click the Enable button.
Once the Early Hints feature is enabled, you can track your site’s improved performance in the Analytics section.
That’s all there is to it. If at any time you decide you don’t need Early Hints and would like to disable them, you can do so in the same section of your MyKinsta dashboard.
Better Performance Starts With Better Hosting
No matter how perfect your code is, your hosting provider still matters. A cheap host can cost you more in bounced visits and potential revenue than you might think.
Kinsta is poised to provide you with all the tools you need without any of the headaches. With our top-of-the-line CPUs and virtual machines on Google’s Premium Tier Network, Kinsta customers are able to deliver their content at lightning speeds to visitors worldwide, picking from any one of our 37 data centers for our C2 machines or any of our 6 data centers for the even faster C3D machines.
Every site hosted at Kinsta also benefits from Kinsta’s CDN, which by itself can improve load times by up to 72%. What’s more, customers gain access to additional built-in speed optimization tools, such as edge caching, code minification, and image optimization — all designed to make your WordPress site load and function at greater speed.
And now, on top of all of that, you’ll also get the Early Hints feature to push your site’s performance to the next level.
Let Early Hints — and Kinsta — go to work for you.