Have you noticed the little lock that appears in your browser when you visit certain web pages? This lock lets you know that the site you are browsing is served over HTTPS and is secured with an SSL certificate.
The reason we’re giving you this technical lesson is that this little lock will become very important to your website in 2017.
This year, Google plans to make changes to their Chrome browser that will mark all websites that don’t use an SSL certificate as ‘not secure’.
From a post by Chrome security engineer, Emily Schechte:
“In following releases, we will continue to extend HTTP warnings, for example, by labelling HTTP pages as ‘not secure’ in Incognito mode, where users may have higher expectations of privacy. Eventually, we plan to label all HTTP pages as non-secure, and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle that we use for broken HTTPS.”
With this announcement in mind, here are the 3 main reasons to secure your website with SSL today:
- No Security Warnings. Securing your website with an SSL certificate is only way to ensure that your website does not display the ‘not secure’ warning in upcoming versions of Google Chrome. If users see that your site is ‘not secure’ they could lose trust in your website and go elsewhere.
- Privacy. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remains private.
- Speed. HTTPS used to require more more resources to match the speed of non-secured HTTP connections, but thanks to the newer HTTP/2 protocol, HTTPS sites will load faster.
Do you want to secure your website ahead of the Google Chrome update?
Morning Studio offers SSL installation services. Click here to find out more.