According to a Google’s announcement, they considered the page load time factor in the ranking system of the search engine and they would favor the website that uses transport layer security(TLS).TLS slows down the website response. This article is about implementation of TLS on your website without compromising speed. TLS is an industry standard protocol that is derived from SSL. In TLS speed can slow down while encrypting the data and establishing the secure connection and in order to make the website fast we need optimization in these two fields. Now let us discuss these areas in detail:
Data Encryption Optimization:
In TLS client server communication process includes the encryption of the data before sending to the server and the server needs to decrypt the data before to process it. For better user experience, we need this process to be efficient. There area large number of ciphers available to perform this encryption and decryption, such as 3DES and AES. Moore’s law and the ciphers eliminated the problem of data encryption but the challenging thing is to use the right cipher. To have the fast and responsive website, the web server needs server grade CPU such as xeon line by Intel that supports AES-NI.
TLS Handshake Optimization:
The browser and server follow the TLS handshake process to communicate and make the secure connection. The Handshake process includes:
- Identification of client and the server.
- Selection of the ciphers.
- Creation and exchanging the keys during the data encryption process.
The typical handshake time is from 250 milliseconds to half of a second. The main part is not the time duration of handshake process, but the right time at which the handshake should happen that is before the data exchange. During the TLS handshake we don’t have any other data that we can optimize. What we can optimize is the server identification confirmation. In order to do so server looks at the certificate chain.
Certification chain optimization:
When we visit a secured website then the server sent a certificate to the browser to make you trust that you are connecting to the right site, the certificate should be in the list of trusted certificates of the browser if it’s not, then the role of the chain comes, in this your certificate is signed digitally by the other entity’s certificate for vouch. Browser can trust any one of the intermediate certificate that matches within the list of the trusted certificates. For site performance optimization, this chain list should be short. Purchase the certificate from large and popular vendor that will offer you better support and OCSP.
Avoiding full TLS Handshakes:
To optimize the performance, use TLS session resumption which reduces the two round trips to the server to only one. Two popular mechanisms for TLS resumption are session identifiers and session tickets. By the implementation of common front end optimizations which includes persistent connections, domain sharding, combining CSS and JavaScript files and caching resources, you can avoid multiple TLS handshakes.
Wind Up:
Platinum SEO is one of the well known Melbourne SEO Services provider in Australia that keep an eagle’s eye on the various google updates as well as website updates in order to completely fulfill client’s needs.