Enabling HSTS for better TTFB

We constantly evolve our speed optimization toolbox and have recently added enabling HSTS headers as one of our standard optimization steps.

HSTS stands for HTTP Strict Transport Security – with HSTS enabled, your site will be more secure, will load faster for repeat visitors via improved TTFB timings and in some cases we’ve seen SEO ranking improvements as a result as in some cases it can resolve canonical SEO issues.

Membership sites and WooCommerce sites will benefit the most from enabling HSTS, as typically those are dealing with sensitive user data and typically have more repeat visitors, but all types of sites will benefit from enabling it.

If you want to read about the technical background this Wikipedia article does a good job of explaining how it works.

How To Check Your HSTS Headers

If you want to check whether HSTS is enabled for your site, use this tool (https://domsignal.com/hsts-test)

If you’re on one of our hosting and maintenance plans our team has likely already enabled this for you.

If you’re not on a maintenance plan our team can still help, just hit reply to this email with your web address and we’ll take a look.

If you missed last weeks email on INP (Interaction to Next Paint), you probably want to check that out – click here to read it

That’s it for this email, hit reply if you have any questions or need more info on the items above.