Starting from today, all CloudFlare websites are loading almost twice faster than before. Cloudflare enabled HTTP/2 for all accounts that enabled the SSL/TLS connections, even for the free customers.
According to a CloudFlare blog post, “If you are a customer on the Free or Pro plan, there is no need to do anything at all. Both SPDY and HTTP/2 are already enabled for you”.
One large benefit of HTTP/2 is the ability to use a single TCP connection from a browser to a website. In this way, all CloudFlare users can see the benefits of HTTP/2, which is to accelerate the web surfing experience between browsers and CloudFlare, without the need for the customers to change anything on the origin server.
Image credits – Cloudflare
As you can see in the above image, there will be only one connection instead of using a separate connection for each file. Thus, the website will load much faster. This image is probably the best comparison example between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2.
Cloudflare also provided the page load improvements:
| Access via HTTP Protocol Version | Average Page Load time |
|---|---|
| HTTP 1.x | 9.07 sec. |
| SPDY/3.1 | 7.06 sec. |
| HTTP/2 | 4.27 sec. |
Cloudflare remember us how much browsers offer support for SPDY over HTTP/2. If Cloudflare won’t offer anymore support for SPDY, more than 50% of it’s users will see lower page load time. That’s the reason why Cloudflare will continue to support both SPDY and HTTP/2.
If you want to learn more regarding HTTP/2, we recommend CloudFlare’s article regarding HTTP/2.
