HTTP: Chrome to start showing NOT SECURE October 2017!

[animalstyle]

Also been hearing interesting things about HTTP/2 offering a 60-70% speed boost. Not supported by all browsers, needs full site HTTPS to run, looks interesting and just another reason to go full SSL.

Has anyone made the switch to HTTP/2 and can validate these claims?

 

[turbin3]

Also been hearing interesting things about HTTP/2 offering a 60-70% speed boost. Not supported by all browsers, needs full site HTTPS to run, looks interesting and just another reason to go full SSL.

Has anyone made the switch to HTTP/2 and can validate these claims?

I have multiple sites on servers with HTTP/2. I can confirm, in some cases there is a noticeable improvement in load time, or at least improving the visual appearance of page load. As they say, sometimes perception is everything.

That being said, I would say there are a few caveats worth taking a step back to consider.

For one, the potential performance improvement might be negligible for small sites, in the grand scheme of things. What I mean by that is, I wouldn't exactly place a migration to HTTP/2 high on my list of site improvements. For a small blog, doubtful it's worth the effort at this point in time. I'd rather focus on content production and scaling in that case. Roll with what you've got, and maybe consider a TLS migration when you can. That's more than good enough for most.

HTTP/2 is one of the new buzzwords, and I suspect will be yet another in a long line of buzzwords that have personified the quote:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil
- Donald Knuth

Don't get me wrong, there's some technological progress and improvements there. Not worth focusing significant resources for the average blogger though.

For larger sites, particularly ecommerce and more complex sites, backend architectural changes always demand more consideration. With larger sites, minor technical issues can become massive. With HTTP/2, for example, there's always factors like caching and caching strategies that need to be considered. Though, on the other side, minor improvements in speed on a large site can have a significantly positive effect on conversion, so there's always that.

Also, consider your audience. For example, some of the main HTTP standards are 1.0 (super old), 1.1 (still pretty hold), 2.0 (HTTP/2). There are others, but most of those you don't want to use. However, if your audience is an older demographic, more likely to have older browser versions, many will not be compatible with some of the newer standards. As always, I'd recommend checking Can I Use and figuring out what makes sense for you.

 

[denisgeo]

I switched yesterday. I was dreading it!!! Because I was worried I'd lose ranking.

But... it took 30 minutes and there was no drop in rankings or traffic with the redirects in place :-)

 

[turbin3]

Interesting. In non-incognito mode on Chrome, now SEMRush does not load and simply displays a warning in the console:

The certificate used to load https://www.semrush.com/ uses an SSL certificate that will be distrusted in an upcoming release of Chrome. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading this resource. See https://g.co/chrome/symantecpkicerts for more information.

The site does load in incognito, however.