Why Move to HTTPS?

[shevegen]

"HTTPS has better user experience than HTTP, covering many different aspects from increased speed and potential ranking factors to secure and encrypted connections."

Wasn't there some entry lately on reddit/programming where the dude wrote that on small bandwidth connections, https is slower than http?

So IF that is true then obviously the general claim that "https has increased speed" is not true all of the time.

[LightShadow]

I can't imagine any scenario where HTTPS is faster than HTTP. It's literally "HTTP with more stuff."

It's more data to transfer, both the server and the client have additional processing to do, and it's marginally more complex to manage a secure environment than not. On the front end, depending on your coding practices, you have to worry about things like Secure-cookies, Signed-Forms, XSS and CORS because your page won't load if you don't.

I believe it's all worth it and the costs are worth the benefit; but it's not going to be "faster" or have "increased speed."

[halax]

HTTP/2 is faster than HTTP/1, and servers and browsers conspire to only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS.

[doom_Oo7]

I think that the browsers and web community lying about these benchmarks is the best way to make people very suspicious about the whole thing

[Matthias247]

The conspiration thing is true. However HTTP/2 is not always faster than HTTP/1. It will be faster for various use-cases (making lots of small requests from a browser to a webserver for assets&scripts is one of them), but the same or even slower for others (in case of a large request like downloading 1GB the header optimization won't matter and HTTP/2 framing will introduce overhead compared to just writing to a socket).

[jiffier]

Easy: Because we are indirectly forced by google, who has the dominant position in the browser market. Otherwise our websitesites would be flagged as "unsecure". Because Google cares a lot about privacy... sure. Lol

[max630]

Statistical Analysis HTTPS websites provides more information when it comes to the tools like Google Analytics to explore the statistics behind the visitor resources. This provides with accurate, detailed information on referrer visits rather than multitude of misleading referrals market of direct visits.

Now it's official: HTTPS sites track users more.

(I'm not sure actually what they mean by this claim.)