What HTTP Does
- You visit a website, example.com
- Your browser sends an HTTP request to that site’s server.
- The server gets the request, figures out what you want (a webpage, an image, whatever).
- It sends back an HTTP response, which includes the content you asked for and a status code that tells the browser what happened.
HTTP Methods
HTTP supports several methods. These aren’t optional, they define what action you’re taking.
- GET: Ask for something. You use this when you load a webpage
- POST: Send data (like a form submission)
- PUT: Replace something
- DELETE: Remove something
If you’re building or debugging an API, you’ll deal with these constantly. A common mistake: using GET when you should be using POST, especially for stuff that changes server data. That’s bad practice and opens up security problems. (Source)
Status Codes
Servers reply with a status code every time. These are three-digit numbers. Learn the common ones:
- 200 OK: Everything worked.
- 301 Moved Permanently: The page has moved, the server is telling you to look somewhere else.
- 404 Not Found: You asked for something that doesn’t exist.
- 500 Internal Server Error: Something broke on the server. Not your fault, but your request didn’t work.
Developers often ignore or misread these codes. That’s a problem. If your app isn’t checking for 4xx or 5xx errors, you’re probably serving broken pages or failing silently.
Does Linking To HTTP Pages Affect SEO?
If you’re working on SEO, at some point you’ll deal with outbound links. Specifically, whether linking to HTTP pages (non-secure) has any effect on SEO. Let’s get straight to the point: Google does not penalize you for linking to HTTP URLs. That’s not speculation, it comes directly from Google’s John Mueller. Search engines like Google will crawl those HTTP links. They’ll follow them. They won’t lower your rankings just because you included them. That’s what “no direct impact on SEO” means. But ranking isn’t the only thing that matters. User trust, behavior, and page experience metrics matters. In short, it does not directly boost your rankings, so its always better to link to a HTTPS website (Source). If you are interested in google rankings, i highly suggest you check out schemawriter.ai. Schemawriter lets you write high quality schema in only a few minutes.
Versions:
- HTTP/1.1 is still everywhere. It allows persistent connections, so your browser doesn’t have to open a new connection for every single file.
- HTTP/2 improves performance with multiplexing, multiple requests at once, on a single connection. Also compresses headers.
- HTTP/3 builds on QUIC, which uses UDP instead of TCP. It’s faster, more reliable in poor networks, and solves some long-standing problems.
Use the latest version your server and CDN support. If you’re stuck on HTTP/1.1, expect slower load times and more connections. Cloudflare and similar services help here, they handle upgrades without needing you to reconfigure everything manually.
Common HTTP mistakes
Sloppy HTTP setups cause real issues. Misusing methods. Failing to redirect properly. Ignoring cache headers. Serving uncompressed assets. Or just not using HTTPS. All of that makes sites slower, less secure, and harder to maintain. Also, don’t assume the browser will magically fix things. It might retry, or display a default error page, but that’s not a fix. If your HTTP responses are broken, your users get a broken experience.