Force https performance

Question

How can i force https on my site without affecting performance.

I'm presently using mod_rewrite in .htaccess and it seems to be impacting performance of the site.

Answer 1

ssl will always affect performance, but there are some ways to boost your ssl-performance:

• use a HSTS-Header in <virtualhost:443> - config
• ssl-cache & keepalive reduces load by reducing the number of ssl-handshakes
• search and check different cipher-suites regarding performance
• gzip / expires can be used to speed up page-load and reduce traffic(http-compression != ssl-compression)
• more advises here; those are for nginx, but might be converted to apache
• performance-tuning for ssl-cipher-suites (untested by me)

Answer 2

You could enable the SPDY protocol, which provides security and high performance. It's not supported much in IE yet, but will help users of most other browsers.