Migrating large sites to HTTP/2

Migrating sites to use the latest and greatest HTTP/2 standard is in theory a simple task. All you need to do is provide an SSL certificate (which are now free from Let's Encrypt) and upgrade your edge side HTTP serving layer to HTTP/2 compatible software.

This is pretty much the process for a simple website or your own blog site. But like many things in web development and life in general, things will get more complicated in real life scenarios. If the site you're running may have been in development for years, they've likely got quite a few hacks in place here and there as well as third party elements that you can't control. In addition some optimisations like domain sharding and aggressive minification have become antipatterns with HTTP/2.

In this presentation we will briefly go through the steps that need to be done when upgrading any site to use HTTPS (a defacto requirement) and HTTP/2. This includes things like SSL offloading and other concepts explained. In addition we will examine some practical tools like Content Security Policy (CSP) that will help you manage the transition of a large and complex site successfully to HTTP/2 without interuptions to visitors or damage to Search Engine ranking.