Early Hints: How Cloudflare Can Improve Website Load Times by 30%

This post introduces Cloudflare's implementation of Early Hints, a web standard utilizing the HTTP 103 Early Hints status code. It explains how Cloudflare leverages its edge network to serve these hints on behalf of origin servers, allowing browsers to asynchronously fetch critical resources during server 'think time'. This reduces page load times, particularly for first-time visitors, by enabling parallelization of resource fetching and page rendering. The post contrasts Early Hints with HTTP/2 Server Push, highlighting Early Hints' 'hinting' approach and its ability to work with 'rel=preload' and 'rel=preconnect' for improved performance.