This post first appeared in our newsletter in early 2024 – click here to subscribe and see the original post
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.
As a side benefit your site will be slightly more secure and will score slightly higher on online security test tools too.
**Note that it goes without saying that your site needs to support HTTPS and have a valid SSL certificate before you enable HSTS.
How To Enable HSTS in Cloudflare
If you’re using Cloudflare HSTS is very easy to enable. Click play on the video below to see a walk through
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.
