Early Hints is an HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 status code (103) that allows a server to send a preliminary response containing Link headers for critical resources before the final HTTP 200 response is ready. This lets the browser start preloading fonts, stylesheets, and scripts — or preconnecting to third-party origins — during the time the server is processing the request and generating the full response, effectively hiding server think-time from the user. Early Hints was standardised in RFC 8297 and received broad adoption in 2022, with Cloudflare enabling it by default for all zones in that year, followed by support in Chrome 103 and later in other browsers. For pages with significant server-side rendering time, Early Hints can reduce LCP by hundreds of milliseconds by allowing the browser to fetch the LCP image or critical CSS while still waiting for the HTML body. It requires server or CDN support and is configured by sending the 103 response with the appropriate Link: <url>; rel=preload headers.