What is HTTP?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It’s the foundation of how data is transferred on the web. Every time your browser loads a page, it’s making HTTP requests to a server and receiving responses back.

HTTP works as a request-response cycle. Your browser sends a request asking for something (a web page, an image, some data) and the server sends back a response with the content and a status code indicating whether it worked. A 200 means success. A 404 means the resource wasn’t found. A 500 means something went wrong on the server.

Requests come in different types depending on what you’re trying to do. GET is for fetching data. POST is for sending data. PUT and PATCH are for updating. DELETE is for removing. These are called HTTP methods, and together they give you a consistent vocabulary for interacting with any web server or API.

HTTPS is HTTP with encryption added. The S stands for Secure. It uses TLS to encrypt the data in transit so nobody can intercept or tamper with it. These days, HTTPS is the standard. Browsers flag plain HTTP sites as “not secure”, and there’s really no reason to use it for anything that matters.

HTTP has evolved over the years. HTTP/1.1 was the dominant version for a long time. HTTP/2 added performance improvements like multiplexing multiple requests over a single connection. HTTP/3 is the latest, built on a different transport protocol to reduce latency further.