Akamai Early Hints: A New Way for Improving User Experience and Core Web Vitals
We’re excited to announce the global launch of Akamai Early Hints. This powerful tool was designed to seriously improve your website's performance.
Early Hints fuels smarter website optimization efforts by providing organizations with the ability to fine-tune Core Web Vitals (CWV).
Building on the success of our 103 Early Hints prototype, our team has streamlined configurations and added comprehensive guides, best practices, and troubleshooting tips to make website optimization easier and faster than ever.
Recap: Core Web Vitals metrics are about more than page speed
In November 2020, Google announced that, beginning in May 2021, a website's score on the three Core Web Vitals metrics would factor into that site’s overall Google search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. Sites that score poorly on Core Web Vitals metrics would therefore rank lower on Google's search engine result pages (SERPs), while sites with stronger scores for these metrics would index higher.
CWV is a set of metrics that measures real-world user experiences of a page’s loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Akamai’s technical SEO and content marketing experts highly recommend that site owners achieve strong Core Web Vitals scores to improve their SEO rankings and ensure excellent user experiences for their website visitors.
Site performance matters for SEO
In today's fast-paced online world, website speed is no longer a luxury — it's a necessity.
When trying to attract their target audience, digital marketers typically rely on tried-and-true SEO strategies like using key search terms, strong CTAs, and SEO tools like heatmaps, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. But not everyone thinks to focus on boosting page speed to improve SEO rankings — and this oversight can have major repercussions.
Across industries and geographies, consumers increasingly rely on the web to access information and manage nearly every aspect of their daily lives. This makes them more discerning and demanding than ever. When consumers experience your website, they’re not only comparing you to competitors on offerings, but also on customer experience — rating you against the best-in-class services they know and love.
Better results with optimized websites
Optimized websites that load quickly and respond to inputs like clicks and taps seem to achieve better user engagement and retention. Stellar web performance can improve several key website metrics, including:
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Revenue per visitor
- Overall sales
On the flip side, subpar web performance can be very costly. In fact, according to BigCommerce, a one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7% conversion loss and 11% fewer page views. For an online store that earns US$50,000 a day, for example, that adds up to more than US$1 million in lost sales per year.
How does Core Web Vitals affect an organization’s digital presence?
CWV directly impacts website performance. From achieving faster load times to improving responsiveness and minimizing layout shifts, improving your Core Web Vitals creates a superior user experience.
Strong CWV is good for business. By improving user experience and on-page SEO, a higher CWV helps businesses significantly boost user engagement, conversion rates, and revenue. Satisfied users are also more likely to return and recommend your business to their friends and social media followers.
CWV plays a key role in SEO rankings. Relevant keyword research, backlinks, and fewer SEO pain points like broken links and duplicate content aren’t the only ranking factors that can drive organic traffic. In search result rankings, search engines prioritize websites that offer a positive user experience — therefore, strong CWV scores can give you a major boost.
CWV metrics provide a holistic view of website health. By improving CWV, you improve more than just loading speeds and user experience — you get a better understanding of your website’s overall health and performance so you can be more competitive across various website metrics.
Introducing Akamai Early Hints
As a leader in website speed performance, Akamai is dedicated to providing customers with the best website experiences possible so that they can create more informed website optimization strategies to increase their website traffic.
For decades, we’ve evolved how our web delivery and optimization process solutions work to improve site performance, delivering intelligent solutions like Adaptive Acceleration and Script Management that capitalize on HTTP/3’s powerful site speed, reliability, and security improvements.
Today, we’re proud to introduce Akamai Early Hints, a powerful tool that will help build on our website performance legacy. This performance and conversion rate optimization solution sends "hints" to the user's browser while the server processes main requests that tell the browser to preload critical resources — such as CSS, JavaScript files, and images — that will be necessary later to properly render the page.
With Early Hints as their primary website optimization tool, organizations are empowered to better focus on web optimization across all devices — including mobile devices like smartphones — so they can improve organic search performance and on-site user behaviors.
Reducing browser load times
Akamai’s new, more proactive website performance approach helps significantly reduce the time it takes for browsers to fully load a page, leading to:
Faster First Contentful Paint (FCP). Content appears on users’ screens more quickly, improving perceived performance.
Improved Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It takes less time to render a page’s main content, so users stay more engaged.
Enhanced Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). By preloading fonts, Early Hints minimizes unexpected layout shifts that can disrupt the user experience.
An in-depth look at how Early Hints works
Imagine you want to build a house (a web page). You (the server) first need to gather materials (resources) and instructions (full server responses) on how to build the house, but sorting through blueprints and gathering supplies takes time (server thinking time). Meanwhile, your friend (the browser) who’s there to help you build the house (render the page) is left standing around waiting.
Early Hints ensures that your friend is primed and ready when the building materials arrive. It tells your friend (the browser) what tools (resources) they may need to work on specific parts of the house (the web page). This way, your friend can grab those tools (resources) in advance while you're busy gathering more materials (resources). By the time you have everything you need (a full server response), your friend will have already made a head start (a faster page load).
Figure 1 illustrates the difference between a browser loading a page with and without Early Hints enabled. Without Early Hints, CSS retrieval, which takes 25 milliseconds (ms), can’t happen until after HTML retrieval (which takes 200 ms). In contrast, enabling Early Hints allows the browser to save time by loading the HTML and CSS concurrently.
Fig. 1: How Early Hints applies server thinking time
Technically, Early Hints sends the server a special message (HTTP status code 103) before sending the main instructions (the 200 OK response). This message tells the browser which resources (such as images and stylesheets) it will likely need to render the page.
The browser can then start fetching these resources in the background while awaiting the full instructions. This reduces the user’s perceived wait time and provides them with a smoother, faster browsing experience.
Early Hints: From prototype to powerful performance booster
The Early Hints prototype garnered extremely positive feedback from our large enterprise customers and exceeded expectations.
Significant performance improvements. One user saw a 300 ms Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) improvement at the 75th percentile (P75) by leveraging Early Hints’ real user monitoring (RUM) service. Another customer documented a 30% improvement in LCP after implementing Early Hints.
Greater flexibility. Users praised the ability to customize which resources are sent as hints to the user's browser.
Streamlined ease of use. Customers highlighted how using Early Hints was as simple as it was beneficial to their brands’ digital presence.
This feedback underscores the power of Early Hints to dramatically enhance website performance and user experiences.
Building on customer feedback
Akamai’s Early Hints production release incorporates the valuable learnings gleaned from our customer prototype phase. This focus on early technical feedback helped us ensure that the final product delivers tangible performance improvements, granular control over hinted resources, and a streamlined, user-friendly management experience.
Akamai Early Hints: The benefits of our unique approach
While Early Hints offers general website performance benefits, Akamai's approach takes things a step further, providing our customers with unique advantages (Figure 2).
Fig. 2: The sequential step-wise flow of Akamai Early Hints
Here's how Akamai's Early Hints design sets itself apart:
- Full control at the edge
- Reduced risk of outdated content
- Easy setup and maintenance
- Granular and programmatic control
- Edge-aware logic
- Compatibility with existing solutions
Full control at the edge
Unlike competitors who rely on the origin server to define early resource hints, Akamai uses its global edge network to more effectively make those decisions, granting us more control over what resources are hinted at to the browser (Figure 3).
The benefit is optimized performance. Akamai can consider factors beyond the origin server's perspective, like user location, network conditions, and real-time data, to optimize which resources are pre-fetched. This can lead to more efficient bandwidth use and faster load times, both crucial to improving user experience and SEO.
Fig. 3: Establishing which resources to hint is as easy as configuring it from the Akamai Property Manager interface
Reduced risk of outdated content
Akamai's edge network can determine if content on the origin server is up-to-date before sending Early Hints. This mitigates the risk of the browser pre-fetching outdated resources.
The benefit is an enhanced user experience. Users will only encounter the latest and most relevant content, avoiding situations in which outdated content is accidentally displayed due to early resource hints.
Easy setup and maintenance
Akamai Early Hints integrates seamlessly with existing workflows and requires no modifications to the origin server.
The benefit is reduced development overhead. Customers can easily activate and manage Early Hints without complex origin server configurations.
Granular and programmatic control
Early Hints offers granular control over early resource hints configurations. Additionally, programmatic control via Akamai EdgeWorkers allows for fine-tuned optimization based on specific requirements.
The benefit is customization and flexibility. Customers can tailor Early Hints behavior to their unique needs and integrate it with their existing workflows through programmatic control.
Edge-aware logic
Early Hints can consider various factors at the edge, including user connection details, referrer information, and cookies.
The benefit is contextual optimization. Akamai can apply these Early Hints data points to potentially deliver even more targeted early resource hints, improving website content performance and relevance for users.
Compatibility with existing solutions
Akamai Early Hints integrates with our popular Property Manager interfaces and EdgeWorkers, which ensures full compatibility with existing tools and workflows.
The benefit is simplified integration. Customers can leverage their existing Akamai infrastructure to take advantage of Early Hints without introducing additional complexities.
Inside the power of Akamai Connected Cloud
Akamai Early Hints goes well beyond basic early resource hint functionality by offering customers full hint control at the edge, reduced risk of outdated content, easier setup, and more granular control. All this value translates to more performant, secure, and user-friendly experiences for your customers.
Akamai Connected Cloud — our massively distributed edge and cloud platform — makes it easy for enterprise organizations to develop and run applications and workloads while we bring experiences closer to users and keep threats further away.
Integrates seamlessly with web delivery and optimization
Early Hints takes advantage of the latest web performance capabilities and seamlessly integrates with other key web delivery and optimization features, including:
HTTP/3 support. You can take full advantage of the HTTP/3 protocol to maximize your website’s speed and efficiency.
Integrated delivery. Whether you use Akamai Ion or Dynamic Site Accelerator for web delivery, Early Hints can seamlessly integrate with your web technology to deliver a unified performance optimization experience.
Enhanced visibility. You can gain valuable site performance and Early Hints impact insights, including the ability to analyze pre-fetching success rates and identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks for further optimization, alongside other delivery data.
What’s next for Early Hints?
Akamai plans to add performance and usability improvements to Early Hints through an automated, machine-learning–based version called Intelligent Hints. This update will allow us to automatically analyze customer web pages and implement the most appropriate logic for early hinting the most relevant resources that impact and improve core web vitals like LCP.
Ready to grow your digital presence with Akamai Early Hints?
Akamai Early Hints is available now to help you unlock the full potential of your website's performance and improve SEO. Contact us to learn more about how to offer high-quality website experiences.