Don’t get caught out by HTTPS!
Last September we wrote about Google’s warning to website owners to move to HTTPS by October 2017. As a brief reminder of that update, from October 2017, Chrome showed the “Not secure” warning when users entered data on a HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.
More recently though, Google has announced an update that could have great implications for your website performance, traffic and SERP’s rankings (Search engine result page), if your site isn’t HTTPS.
According to Google’s latest security blog ‘A secure web is here to stay’: “Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”.”
Here’s an example of the eventual treatment of HTTP pages:
Clearly, being named and shamed as ‘Not secure’ is not a good impression to users of your site and the negative effects listed above are quite easily avoidable.
Equally, if you’re using Adwords, Google recommends (and in some cases, requires) that all URLs use the HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP to protect customers’ personal and financial information.
Over the past few years we have been helping a number of our clients to transition their sites to HTTPS and this has been rolled out as best practice by the vast majority of developers:
- Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
- Over 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected
- 81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default
We urge you to take immediate actions as this change will begin July 2018!
So what do you need to do? In order to move your website to HTTPS you need to install a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate. Depending on your hosting provider, standard yearly SSL renewal fees start from just £30 + an installation fee.
We offer this as a full service, from purchase and installation right through to your yearly renewals.
If you’d like more information about how to get an SSL certificate onto your site to avoid being marked as ‘unsecure’, boost your rankings and prove your credibility on the internet email: ross@fuel-growth.com for more information on how we can help.
