How Fastly and Yottaa Transform Site Performance with Early Hints

In the world of web performance, nothing is more critical to your users - and your bottom line - than the speed at which they can see and interact with your most important content. Improving metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Time to First Byte (TTFB) are critical objectives for performance-focused engineering teams, particularly those managing high-traffic e-commerce sites, content-heavy media platforms, and latency-sensitive applications. 

Early Hints is a powerful web standard that transforms idle browser time into productive preloading, dramatically improving how quickly users see your critical content. While your origin server processes requests, Early Hints allows browsers to start fetching essential resources immediately - hero images, critical CSS, key fonts - the exact elements that impact LCP and TTFB metrics.

Now Available on Fastly Compute

We're excited to announce that Early Hints is now available on Fastly Compute, in addition to our CDN platform. This expansion means you can leverage the full programmability of Compute to create dynamic, personalized Early Hints strategies—all included in your existing Compute pricing with zero configuration required to get started.

Real-World Impact: Yottaa's Success Story

The measurable impact of Early Hints is why leading web optimization companies like Yottaa have made it central to their performance strategy. As an e-commerce-focused performance company managing over 1,000 properties on Fastly's edge platform, Yottaa knows that faster LCP and TTFB directly correlates with higher conversion rates.

"Early Hints is a cornerstone of our Yottaa accelerator template on Fastly," explains Benjamin Trafton, Vice President Performance Engineering at Yottaa.  "Alongside Image Optimization, intelligent caching rules, WAF protection, and real-time Compute Services for HTML transformation, Early Hints delivers consistent performance gains across our entire customer base."

While the Early Hints rules vary by customer site, Yottaa typically selects a few core third-party resources and key rendering script/file elements so the browser can get a jump on loading them - and the results have been impressive:

40% improvement in TTFB

10% improvement in LCP

Now, Yottaa is exploring the advanced capabilities of Early Hints on Compute to push performance even further:

• Predictive preloading: Analyzing user behavior to predict and pre-select the next best pages a customer might visit

• Dynamic optimization: Automatically updating hints based on real-time analysis of source code, identifying common render-blocking resources and critical first-party assets

Early Hints on the Fastly Platform: A Competitive Advantage

Historically, Fastly has supported Early Hints for our CDN customers using VCL (Varnish Configuration Language.) Our latest release, however, provides support for Early Hints on the Compute platform. While the VCL implementation is powerful, Early Hints on Compute is a game-changer because it allows developers to programmatically and dynamically generate hints directly at the edge using any of our supported SDKs. This provides an unprecedented level of flexibility and control, allowing for sophisticated optimizations that were previously not possible.

With Early Hints on Compute, developers can create logic to do things such as:

• Send personalized hints based on a user's logged-in status or past behavior.

• Serve different sets of hints for mobile users versus desktop users.

• Fetch a list of hints from an edge data store like Fastly's KV Store.

• Tailor the content based on a user's geographic location.

This flexibility empowers developers to build and deploy innovative solutions that significantly outperform the competition. The benefits are included in your Compute pricing, making it a cost-effective way to achieve a competitive edge.

Claim Your Performance Advantage

Early Hints is a powerful tool that directly addresses core challenges of web performance. With Fastly's platform, you can not only implement Early Hints but also extend its capabilities with the power of Compute to dynamically create personalized and optimized experiences for every user.

As Yottaa's success demonstrates, the combination of Early Hints with Fastly's edge platform delivers measurable, sustained performance improvements at scale. Whether you're focused on improving Core Web Vitals, boosting conversion rates, or delivering superior user experiences, Early Hints on Compute gives you the tools to stay ahead of the competition.

Check out our documentation to learn more, and please be sure to join the conversation in our forum to let us know what you are building!