HTTP headers are a crucial part of web communication, carrying vital information between clients and servers. Understanding them can be incredibly helpful for web developers for debugging, optimizing performance, and enhancing security.
What are HTTP Headers?
HTTP headers are key-value pairs that are exchanged in the request and response messages of an HTTP transaction. They provide metadata about the request or the response, or about the object itself in the message body.
Common Request Headers:
- User-Agent: Information about the client making the request (e.g., browser type).
- Accept: The media types the client can understand.
- Authorization: Credentials for authenticating the client.
Common Response Headers:
- Content-Type: The media type of the resource.
- Content-Length: The size of the response body in bytes.
- Cache-Control: Directives for caching mechanisms.
- Set-Cookie: Sends a cookie from the server to the user agent.
You can easily inspect HTTP headers for any URL using our HTTP Headers Viewer tool.