Most people we speak to don’t know the potential benefits of switching their website to https, so here’s how it can help you.
Firstly, What is it?
I’m going to try and keep this relatively low tech – HTTPS webpages typically uses SSL to encrypt communications which involves two ‘keys’ to encrypt communications, a ‘public’ key and a ‘private’ key. Anything encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by the private key and vice-versa. So if you think of it as a safe, if only you and the person you are sending to the safe to know the combination no one else and look inside. If you send the safe with the door open, there is potential for anyone to see what’s inside.
How do I know if a website is secure?
It will typically be shown by your browser – when a trusted SSL Digital Certificate is used during a HTTPS connection, users will see a padlock icon in the browser address bar. When an Extended Validation Certificate is installed on a web site, the address bar will turn green. and may look like one of the following:
Does your website need HTTPS though?
We get this a lot – It’s either “we don’t have any login screens” or “we don’t transfer any sensitive data”. However supporting HTTPS on your site has so much more to offer than just protecting passwords and user’s sensitive data.
Performance Benefits
There is widely documented proof and there are loads of great sites and tools to show how HTTPS can be faster than http – a demo of this can be seen here: https://www.httpvshttps.com/
SEO Benefits
So what’s it mean for you on the SEO side of things? Well Google have confirmed that HTTPS is now a factor that Google look at when ranking your website – although at the moment it’s not a huge factor every little helps, and I’m sure this will become a larger factor later down the line.
Browser Warnings
As of January 2017 with the release of Google Chrome 56 any website that is not running HTTPS will have a message appear in the location bar that says “Not Secure” on pages that collect passwords or credit cards and there are future plans from both Firefox and Chrome to show a ‘Not Secure’ message for non-HTTPS website in the future.
The Studio 4 can provide hosting solutions with SSL encryption. If you have any questions or aren’t sure on if your website is capable then please Contact us today.