Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Bemob w/ no https? (15)

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Bemob started giving their campaign links without https by default claiming this leads to faster redirect times.

Is this a recommended practice or should I keep them https?

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Using https is the norm these days, running without it might have an impact on the performance due to possible security alerts on the browsers side.

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I am also using Bemob, i had the same doubt earlier and had consulted with the Bemob's support staff,
They said that using http instead of https (in tracking link) makes the page load faster.

If your custom domain has SSL certificate, i don't think there shud be any problem.

I guess, it's required for your LP domain to be HTTPs, not the tracking domain.

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Sooner or later, any non "S" domain in the chain will cause trouble, I'm pretty sure about it. I'd like to see some comparison when it comes to the speed and how big the difference actually is. I've done some http VS https tests and didn't really notice anything significant. Https didn't improve anything either though, it's just about not being flagged by whatever system or browser.

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You cud be right, But Bemob's support team told me that http will increase the loading speed.
Though, i did see drop in ROI in recent months, i don't know if it's due to http issue or something else.

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It might improve the speed of the redirect, but I guess we are talking about a few ms here, I doubt it could have some significant effect on the overall performance. Did they say how big the difference would be?

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This. It's a VERY small increase in speed.

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The difference in speed is due to what is called the TLS handshake, which is client and server exchanging their SSL keys to secure the https connection. It happens once per domain / sub domain, and takes between 250 and 400ms usually with TLS 1.2 protocol, as there are 2 client-server roundtrips required to perform the handshake.

TLS 1.3 protocol is currently being deployed since end of 2019, and allow single roundtrip and zero roundtrip handshakes, so the speed difference is becoming less and less relevant.

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Got it. So go with https that is.

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Hm, I thought it would be even less. How much takes the "regular" http?

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Here's how it works:



I stole this image from here: https://love2dev.com/blog/how-https-works/

250-400ms is an old figure probably. These days internet speeds are much faster so I'd guess it's 250ms or less.. probably less for most people.

The "regular HTTP" does not involve the TLS part (shown on the image) and after the TCP handshake your browser sends the HTTP request header and you get a response from the server.

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I checked a few months ago how long it takes to open a server to server connection on backend, and it was around 400ms for HTTPS vs 800ms for HTTPS.

For client server, especially if you're on a CDN, it is probably less because most have implemented TLS 1.3 and because the server is near the client.

If you want to check the difference, Cloudfront allow you to select the protocol at distribution level.

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I think downgrading to HTTP because its "faster" is not a good idea at all.

There's security issues and potential browser warnings that will kill your traffic. It will drop insecure cookies. Then you can't use https clickthrough links on the page and use those cookies (not that I would rely on cookies). But now if you use http clickthrough links and your page is using HTTPS (which it should be!), you're going to get potential secure > insecure warnings again AND will get referrer blanking.

Not to mention, many traffic sources require https links to be used.

Additionally, the latest SSL versions actually increase performance of repeat requests, so the initial redirect may be slower because of handshakes, but subsequent clickthroughs could be faster because of connection keepalives, handshakes not being repeated, etc.

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Damn, Bemob launched this feature last month. I argued with their support staff and they somehow convinced me to go with http.
In that while, i might have already launched 300-400 campaigns(without https).
God knows how much money i might have lost.

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To take some pressure of your chest. I did quite a few tests to compare http and https when it started to become a thing and I didn't notice any significant difference, so I wouldn't say that you have necessarily lost any money by going with http with those campaigns. I posted this a few replies above, maybe you have missed it But for the future, I would personally go with httpS

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