CloudFlare introduced the industry’s first-ever HTTP/2 Server Push support for all customers for free.
HTTP/2 Server Push a technology or Internet standard designed for faster loading of websites and mobile applications.
How HTTP/2 Server Push works
HTTP/2 Server Push enables web servers to provide content to site visitors without waiting for a request.
This builds on CloudFlare’s support of HTTP/2, announced last year, that automatically speeds up web properties for all customers with the latest version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The initial benefit of HTTP/2 was the ability to have multiple HTTP requests share a single connection between the browser and a web server–but it still required a dedicated request for each CSS, JavaScript, or image file on a page.
Server Push is a fundamental update to HTTP/2 which was not previously available or supported by Google’s SPDY, the protocol that HTTP/2 is based on.
With HTTP/2 Server Push the resources an application needs can be proactively pushed to a device without waiting to be requested.
This new HTTP/2 functionality allows a web server to send resources like images, CSS, JavaScript, and fonts back to the user before their browser even knows it needs them.
This eliminates an additional round-trip for every resource in a web page, resulting in an estimated 15 percent performance increase for a typical website.
“Usually, Internet performance improvements shave just milliseconds. In this case, the impact of HTTP/2 Server Push will be measured in seconds per page load, a quantum leap in performance that no service provider has been able to offer yet,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of CloudFlare.
“If with HTTP/2 Server Push we’re able to save one second off every page load served across CloudFlare’s network at our current scale, we would save about 10,000 years of time every day that people would have otherwise spent waiting for the Internet to load.”
