HTTP/2 or HTTP2 is the latest update of the HTTP protocol by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Websites have changed dramatically in the interim, with the number of external images, CSS, and JavaScript assets. HTTP/1.1 was not designed for this kind of complexity but HTTP2 is optimized for the modern website and improves the performance. HTTP/2.0 speeds up your website without any changes to your existing codebase. HTTP/2.0 is a much-required refresh, as the web has changed over the years. The update brings with it advancements in efficiency, security, and speed.
HTTP/2.0 can speed up your website without any changes to your existing codebase. It can bring the advancements in efficiency, security, and speed. This protocol is the successor to HTTP/1.1, which was drafted in 1999.
Hyper Text Transfer protocol 2 was based largely on Google’s own protocol SPDY. This protocol had many of the same features found in HTTP/2.0 and managed to improve data transmission while keeping backward compatibility. SPDY had already proven many of the concepts used in Hyper Text Transfer protocol 2.
Major Improvements In HTTP2 or HTTP/2
- Only one connection to the server is used to load a website, and that connection remains open as long as the website is open. This reduces the number of round trips needed to set up multiple TCP connections. Multiple requests are allowed at the same time, on the same connection. Previously, with HTTP/1.1, each transfer would have to wait for other transfers to complete.
- Additional resources can be sent to a client for future use.
- Requests are assigned dependency levels that the server can use to deliver higher priority resources faster.
- Makes HTTP/2.0 easier for a server to parse, more compact and less error-prone. There is no need for additional time for translating information from the text to binary, which is the computer’s native language.
- HTTP/2.0 uses HPACK compressions, which reduces overhead. Many headers were sent with the same values in every request in HTTP/1.1.