HTTP Headers Tell You More About a Website Than Its Source Code

Every HTTP response includes headers that most developers never look at. These headers reveal the server technology, caching strategy, security posture, CDN configuration, and sometimes even internal infrastructure details that the site owner probably did not intend to expose. Learning to read HTTP headers is one of the most useful debugging and analysis skills in web development. Security headers you should check Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) : Forces browsers to use HTTPS. Without it, the first request to your domain might be HTTP, vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attack before the redirect. Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload Content-Security-Policy (CSP) : Controls which resources the browser can load. A strong CSP prevents most XSS attacks by restricting script sources. Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'; script-src 'self' https://cdn.example.com; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' X-Content-Type-Options : Prevents MIME type sniffing. W