On February 18, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) announced the final specifications for HTTP/2. The aim of this new protocol was to speed up the web. A good thing for webperf! We’ve been helping websites make the transition to HTTP/2.
The major advances of HTTP/2
With the finalization of HTTP/2, deployment began in early 2016 and is now deployed on the majority of browsers.
The major changes in this new protocol are:
- compression of request and response headers: bandwidth is reduced
- multiplexing of requests to the server: multiple connections between the client and the server are no longer necessary, and requests are made simultaneously, without any limit, by the browser. In this way, a low-priority resource (such as an image) no longer blocks a higher-priority resource (such as CSS).
- push of resources from the server to the browser: even before the browser requests them (for example, the server sends CSS and JS referenced in the same page before the browser has analyzed it).
Fasterize has deployed HTTP/2 on its engine
Fasterize activated HTTP/2 on its default engine several months ago. As you can see from the image below, HTTP/2 enables all resources to be downloaded in parallel.
This intermediate step has enabled the sites we optimize to switch smoothly to the new HTTP/2 protocol and see their pages load faster, without any additional modifications.
In this same example, the gains in loading time and Speed Index are far from negligible (-14% and -30% respectively).
