All websites that don’t start with HTTPS will be marked as “Not secure” by Chrome browsers starting July 2018 and this will affect your visitors’ view of your website.
The most popular browser in use, Google’s Chrome, is making some changes come July 2018. All websites that don’t start with HTTPS will be marked as “Not secure” by Chrome browsers starting July 2018 and this will affect your visitors’ view of your website. The Chrome browser will mark your website like below:
HTTPS provides the following benefits:
- Google gives a boost in search rank for HTTPS sites
- HTTPS secures data transfer between form submissions
- HTTPS speeds up your website’s download times
For some time now, Google has been pushing website owners to HTTPS. Now Google’s Chrome browser will alert visitors in a way that could confuse or scare them away.
In the past, I’ve recommended HTTPS to some of you who had warning issues come up due to past hacking or if you sell products online. Now, it just seems like a good idea to switch to HTTPS for any site. I didn’t know they were going to go this far with the warning in the browser. Here’s Google’s article on the browser change.
So here’s what you can do:
Contact your website hosting company and see if they have a free security certificate and a one-click solution for all this. I know my hosting company did and I just finished securing my last personal website. The process is usually three steps:
- Buying and enabling the security certificate (which is sometimes free).
- Updating all the links in your website to go to the HTTPS instead of HTTP.
- Forcing any visitor who happens to land on your old links to redirect to the new ones that start with HTTPS.
Sometimes, your hosting company can handle all the above for free, but for others, it may require you to the handle the latter two steps.
Cloudflare Users
Cloudflare users have access to a free security certificate and Cloudflare is free. So if your hosting company doesn’t supply free certificates, then you should get Cloudflare account and take advantage of not only the benefits of speed but the free certificate.
Start by contacting your hosting company to see what they can do, if you need further assistance, we can help.