How to Enable HTTP/2 support in NGINX Bitnami Website 2021

Enable HTTP/2 on your webserver and speed up your blog, website, or application. HTTP/2 improves the speed by loading all scripts, CSS parallel instead of one by one. You can read more about HTTP/2 at Google official.

Enable HTTP/2 in Bitnami NGINX — Enable http2 in Bitnami NGINX

How HTTP/2 boost the speed of a website or blog?

On HTTP1.1, every website component loads one after another, but in HTTP/2, each type of file loads together synchronously. That means it loads all CSS files in once and then JS, so the time taken is less than HTTP/1.1. So it will be a good practice to enable HTTP/2 for your web server.

The HTTP/2 is a lot faster than that of HTTP1.1. So it would be best if you considered enabling the HTTP/2 feature.

How to Enable HTTP/2?

You can enable HTTP/2 just by editing bitnami.conf file of your bitnami WordPress nginx stack. To do this, you’ve to execute the following command.

sudo -i

Command for older structure for Bitnami WordPress NGINX

nano opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/bitnami/bitnami.conf

If you installed bitnami stack on or after 17 May 2021, execute the following command.

nano /opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/server_blocks/wordpress-https-server-block.conf

Now the .conf file will open up. You’ve to add http2 in the 443 server connection block as displayed below.

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        server_name  localhost;
       ssl_certificate      server.crt;
       ssl_certificate_key  server.key;
        ssl_certificate      
        ssl_session_cache    shared:SSL:1m;
        ssl_session_timeout  5m;

        ssl_session_tickets off;
        ssl_stapling on;
        ssl_stapling_verify on;
        ssl_ciphers  HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
#       ssl_prefer_server_ciphers  on;
#        include "/opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/bitnami/phpfastcgi.conf";
       include "/opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/bitnami/bitnami-apps-prefix.conf";
    }

Save the settings by pressing ctrl+X, then Y, and then press enter to update the changes.

Now you can check that all the settings you made are correct using the following command line.

nginx -t

If all settings are correct, you can restart nginx to load a new configuration.

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart nginx

After the restart, you can check the HTTP/2 status of your website, which will result as enabled. Improve server security by hiding the nginx server version.