https gives speed advantage?

[denisl]

Just deployed my first new site for a number of years and, after some consideration, decided to go https (hoping for some benefits now or in the future, and it is easier to start the way you intend to continue). However, before I used htaccess to force the site into https, I used Google Page Speed Insights to compare the speed of the http version to that of https.

I was surprised to see a significant higher result with https than http.

Is this real, or is Google making different comparisons when they give the score out of 100?

[not2easy]

If this testing was done before forcing https, the Google Page Speed test may have tried it with http/2 which does claim a high speed advantage. There's a discussion about that here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Note that it is not automatically a feature of switching to https and there are a few extra steps to enable https via http/2.

[iamlost]

I spent much of June and July switching my sites to HTTP/2. Technically fairly simple, mindset was by the far the hardest challenge. :)

HTTP/1.1 is all about minimising HTTP requests. Head-of-line blocking (includes render blocking) due to the serial nature of the process is a major consideration: a client response is required before sending the next asset. Fewer bigger files tend to be more efficient.

HTTP/2 turns that on it's head. Now it is all about leveraging caching behaviour. More smaller files sent pseudo-parallel in a multiplexing asynchronous fashion. Head-of-line blocking is no more. Also header compression significantly reduces overhead per request.

So, no more sharding domains, concatenating files, inlining CSS and javascript...
However, do still minimise DNS lookups, size of HTTP request and response, leverage browser caching...

August was my first full month delivering via HTTP/2 (~87%) with fallback to HTTP/1.1 (~13%). It varied by page but overall HTTP/2 was ~64% faster than equivalent HTTP/1.1. YRMV.

I'm spending this month testing HTTP/2 server push to figure best practices... the fun never ends :)