Progressive Web Application Development by Example

HTTPS can be significantly faster than HTTP

Some technologies designed to make websites faster only work with HTTPS. One example is a protocol enhancement known as HTTP/2. Take the HTTP versus HTTPS test to see this in action (see https://www.httpvshttps.com/ for details).

When I first saw research showing HTTPS to be faster, I admit I was skeptical. I saw how much time the encryption adds in network waterfalls. Fortunately, the folks managing browsers and network stacks have done us a solid and smoothed out many of the issues that cause SSL to be slower than non-SSL, as illustrated in the following quote from Adam Langley at Google:

"On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10 KB of ...