Nginx 1.9.5 with HTTP/2 Support Now Available

The nginx core team has released a new version in the mainline branch, which comes with an experimental module for HTTP/2 support. The new version is now available to all Pressjitsu customers on demand.

The new HTTP/2 protocol is based on Google’s SPDY protocol, which we’ve supported on our platform for quite a while and it works great, but HTTP/2 is the future. The new protocol has faster encrypted connections, multi-host multiplexing, better compression and prioritization. In other words, it’s just faster.

HTTP/2 is already supported by fresh versions of most major web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 11 (limited support), Microsoft Edge and others. At the time of writing there’s no support in the native Android Browser (although Chrome for Android has full support) and Opera Mini, which means the connection there will fall back to regular HTTP.

For WordPress this doesn’t change much, except that performance techniques used by many plugins such as concatenation, domain sharding, etc. will no longer be required, which is great news. The HTTP/2 and SPDY Indicator chrome extension will let you know which sites are running the newer protocols.

HTTP/2 is the future and will eventually become a default on all web servers. Meanwhile, Pressjitsu clients can open a support request to enable HTTP/2 on their servers.