Technical SEO

HTTP/2

Quick Definition

HTTP/2 is the second major version of the HTTP protocol, introducing multiplexing, header compression, and server push for materially faster page loads.

In context

HTTP/2 became the dominant web protocol around 2018 and is now table-stakes for any modern site. The performance benefits: a single TCP connection handles many requests in parallel (multiplexing), eliminating the head-of-line blocking that hurt HTTP/1.1; HPACK header compression cuts overhead; and prioritisation lets browsers fetch critical resources first. Most Canadian hosts and CDNs enable HTTP/2 by default with TLS. There is no SEO ranking signal for HTTP/2 specifically, but the page-experience benefits flow through to Core Web Vitals.

Example

A Toronto site moved from a shared host (HTTP/1.1) to Cloudflare in front of the same origin and saw LCP drop ~400ms on mobile largely from HTTP/2 multiplexing.

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