5 ways to improve website speed with HTTP / 2

HyperText Transfer Protocol version 2 (Hypertext Transfer Protocol version 2) or HTTP / 2 is the latest HTTP standard. Updates to this protocol will improve the speed, performance and security of web traffic. However, the conversion process does not happen automatically.

This article is intended to give you insight into HTTP / 2 and how to configure the website or server to take advantage of new features.

What does HTTP / 2 mean for users?

For ordinary users, changes from HTTP / 1.1 to HTTP / 2 will be no big difference.

All browsers will require valid TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates to 'serve' sites via HTTP / 2. Therefore, in addition to faster page loading, as well as increased site security.

For designers and web owners, HTTP / 2 can improve the loading speed of websites on all devices.

All modern browsers have supported the new protocol standard (but some mobile browsers still do not support HTTP / 2). However, in case the browser or server does not support HTTP / 2, the HTTP / 1.1 standard will automatically be used.

How will HTTP / 2 affect website design?

The changes introduced in HTTP / 2 will affect how users optimize web pages and servers to be effective and best.

The new features introduced in HTTP / 2 allow users to overcome many of the drawbacks and limited optimization techniques of HTTP / 1. This includes no longer inline scripts (inline scripts that are not loaded from external files, but embedded within HTML) or combining files to reduce the requirement for the server. Domain sharding (a technique to divide resources across multiple domains to improve page load time) is no longer useful.

In some cases, these restrictions will even negatively affect page speed if it is applied to the HTTP / 2 protocol.

Most Internet traffic is based on mobile devices, so consider internet speed on mobile devices and keep media files small, optimize them for these devices. Users should also continue to minify (techniques to reduce the available file size) JavaScript (JS), HTML and CSS.

HTTP concepts need to be captured

In the case of not familiar with the terms mentioned in this article, this is a quick introduction to the HTTP concepts to grasp.

Inlining Script is to add JavaScript directly to HTML documents with tags