What is HTTP/3?
HTTP/3 is essentially a redesign of the transport layer that underlies file transfers.
It represents a switch from TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) to UDP (User Datagram Protocol), resolves some TCP restrictions, and offers powerful performance and security.
73% of web browsers already support the protocol, however, it is still awaiting final approval before release.
While this is currently experimental and must be enabled through the developer menu, this number will increase significantly once Safari makes it a standard feature.
25% of the top 10 million websites, including Google and Facebook, already use the HTTP/3 protocol.
HTTP/3 Doesn’t Affect SEO, According to John
John Mueller from Google points out that HTTP/3 does not directly affect essential web functions and therefore effective SEO.
For those of you not familiar, HTTP/3 is the third-generation HTTP protocol that replaces HTTP/2. In short, it speeds up the internet, and businesses like Facebook and Google have been using the new protocol for some time.
Does HTTP/3 affect SEO?
Many businesses also use the new protocol. This has some benefits because increasing server speed is never a bad thing, but John Mueller, a Google search attorney, said this week that HTTP/3 adoption won’t directly affect SEO.
In 2021, Mueller noted that HTTP/3 could indirectly influence key web metrics by improving the user experience, but he now believes this is not the case.
The Mueller confirmation came in response to a November Google SEO Office Hours question: “Could the use of HTTP/3 boost SEO because it improves performance?”
I believe that the performance benefits users will experience using HTTP/3 will not be enough to make a big impact on the core web vitals, which are the metrics we use to calculate the Page Experience Ranking Factor. While making servers faster is usually a good thing, I doubt you’ll notice the direct correlation between SEO and HTTP/3 usage. How it’s hard to find a direct link between using faster types of RAM in your server.
So there you have it, improving the user experience or speeding up websites won’t have a significant impact on SEO.
Conclusion
Another significant development for the web is HTTP/3, which will give it the performance boost it needs to keep evolving.
Before the protocol is officially published, as SEO and digital marketing experts, we should know its benefits to get started.
