What is Signed Exchange and its effect on Magento 2 eCommerce

In our previous blog, we learned about Core Web Vitals and how we can improve these Web Vitals. Signed Exchanges are also used to improve these Web Vitals in your e-commerce store.

What is a Signed Exchange(SXG)?

Signed Exchange is a new technique that allows you to authenticate the validity of a web page. This can be used to find the original publisher of a page, regardless of where the content is served from.

This allows browsers to safely display the original URL rather than the hostname of the computer that provided the bytes to the browser in the URL bar.

How Signed Exchange Work?

This allows a publisher to sign a single HTTP exchange (i.e., a request/response pair) so that it can be served by any caching server.

Signed Exchanges work by digitally sealing web content, like a virtual signature, to ensure its origin and authenticity.

Because the signature in the exchange is adequate proof that the information originated from the publisher’s origin, the browser can safely show the publisher’s URL.

A Signed Exchange is a binary-encoded file that has two main elements: an HTTP exchange and a signature. A request URL, content negotiation information, and an HTTP response make up the HTTP exchange.

Supported Browsers – Chrome 73, Edge 79, and Opera 64

Requirements for Signed Exchange –

In order to implement a Signed Exchange, follow the below requirements –

• Signed Exchange doesn’t work on HTTP, So your website must use HTTPS, which provides a secure connection between the server and the user browser.
• Your SSL/TLS certificates should be up-to-date and trusted by browsers.
• Every six weeks, the packager must be updated.
• A shared storage filesystem that is persistent across all amppackager instances in the same data center.
• The ability to construct AMP-signed exchanges using amppackager, a Go binary, or a Docker VM.
• The amppackager-running system must be able to send outgoing network requests to:
  • The certificate authority that issues your certificate.
  • The publisher server that hosts the AMP documents to sign.
  • cdn.ampproject.org to obtain the current version of AMP.

Effects of Signed Exchange on Magento 2

Signed Exchange has these impacts on our Magento 2 store –

• Because of their privacy advantages over non-SXG formats, SXGs are excellent for prefetching.
• Publishers can use Signed Exchanges (SXG) to make their information portable while maintaining its integrity and attribution.
• A SXG is only valid for 7 days at most. If an SXG’s expiration date is more than 7 days away, the browser will reject it.
• Serving content as SXG may result in considerable performance benefits for sites that receive a lot of traffic from Google Search.
• When accessible, Google Search began connecting to signed AMP pages provided by Google’s cache. This allows content to be prefetched without compromising privacy.
• You can use the URL Inspection Tool to see if any SXG-related errors arise on the AMP portion of the analysis to assist in verifying that a certain page is delivered using SXG.

Conclusion

Google Search may prefetch your information via signed exchanges (SXG) while maintaining the user’s privacy.

In reality, this implies that if the related website supports SXG, both AMP and non-AMP results displayed on Google Search may prefetch a few important resources in a privacy-preserving manner.

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