Dries Buytaert

Explanation

The date and time at which the request was made. A browser uses it for age calculations rather than using its own internal date and time; e.g. when comparing against Max-Age or Expires.

The type of the message body, specified as a MIME type.

The Vary header specifies a list of headers that must be considered when caching responses. For a cached response to be used, these headers must match between the cached response and the new request. This ensures that the appropriate version of a resource is served based on factors like language, encoding, or device type.

The Vary header specifies a list of headers that must be considered when caching responses. For a cached response to be used, these headers must match between the cached response and the new request. This ensures that the appropriate version of a resource is served based on factors like language, encoding, or device type.
Notice Varying on cookie is often a bad practice, especially for anonymous visitors. It can lead to poor cache hit rates if cookies are unique to each visitor.
Notice Varying on user-agent can lead to low cache efficiency due to the high number of unique user agents. Only use this if you're serving significantly different content based on user agent.

This header enables the browser's built-in XSS protection. However, it's considered legacy and modern browsers may ignore it.

A Cross-Origin Opener Policy (COOP) header specifies how this page's browsing context can be shared when opened in a 'browser tab', 'popup', 'iframe', etc. The policy can force the creation of a new top-level browsing context to make sure the browser context is protected or isolated.
same-origin specifies that the page can only share the browsing context with other pages from the same origin.

X-Frame-Options prevents this URL from being embedded in an iframe. This protects against clickjacking attacks.
sameorigin means that this page can be displayed in a iframe, but only on the currrent origin. It can't be displayed on another domain. Consider setting this to deny for added security.

The Content Security Policy (CSP) header helps prevent cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking, and other code injection attacks by specifying which dynamic resources are allowed to load.
frame-ancestors defines what parents may embed a page using <frame>, <iframe>, <object>, <embed> or <applet>.
Notice Consider adding the upgrade-insecure-requests directive to automatically upgrade HTTP requests to HTTPS, helping to prevent mixed content issues.

Notice This is a deprecated version of the Content Security Policy header. Modern browsers use the Content-Security-Policy header without the "X-" prefix.

When a visitor navigates from one page to another page, browsers often pass along referrer information. The Referrer-Policy header controls how much referrer information a browser can share. This is important because private information can be embedded in the path or query string.
strict-origin-when-cross-origin means that the protocol, host, port, path and query string are shared for same-site requests. For cross-site requests, protocol, host, and port are shared, but only when the protocol security level remains the same (HTTP → HTTP, HTTPS → HTTPS). For cross-site requests where the protocol becomes less secure (HTTPS → HTTP), nothing is shared.

This Expires date is in the past: the page is considered stale and will be removed from all caches.
Notice Because there is a Cache-Control header with a max-age and/or s-maxage directive, the Expires header will be ignored. Consider removing Expires to save bandwidth and processing power.

no-cache means the response can be stored by any cache, but the stored response must be validated with the origin server before each reuse. If the origin confirms that the response hasn't changed, downloading of the full response body can be skipped.
Warning no-cache will cause a revalidation request to the origin server for every use of the cached response. Consider using public with appropriate max-age to improve caching efficiency.
Warning no-store means the response may not be stored in any cache, including the browser's cache.
max-age=0 with must-revalidate means browser caching is disabled and browsers must validate every request with the origin server. However, because s-maxage=0 is set, shared caches (like CDNs) will still cache the content for 0 seconds. s-maxage overrides max-age for shared caches (e.g. CDN, Varnish) but not for browser caches.
Notice It does not make sense to set must-revalidate with no-store; when nothing is cached, there is nothing to revalidate.
Notice It does not make sense to set must-revalidate with no-cache; must-revalidate is implied.
Notice no-store is set, so it does not make sense to set no-cache as well.

A cookie that was sent from the server to the browser.
path= indicates the path that must exist in the requested URL for the browser to send the cookie.
secure instructs the browser to only send the cookie back when HTTPS requests are used, making it more resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks.
httponly forbids JavaScript from accessing the cookie. Helps mitigate the risk of client side scripts accessing a protected cookie.

missing Add a Strict-Transport-Security header. The Strict-Transport-Security header or HSTS header is used to instruct browsers to only use HTTPS, instead of using HTTP. It helps enforce secure communication.

missing Add a Permissions-Policy header. Restrict access to device features like the camera, microphone, location, accelerometer and much more.

missing Add a Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy to specify how this page can be loaded by cross-origin resources.

missing Add a Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy header to specify who can load this page.

missing Add a X-Permitted-Cross-Domain-Policies header to prevent Flash, Adobe Reader and other clients from sharing data across domains.