Secure Your Website Before You Loose Business
As mentioned previously in the “Google Chrome Security Changes Coming” article, Google is making a major update to its forth coming release of Google Chrome 56; they are going to get tough with their warning messages to website visitors. This is an imminent release.
Google also has plans to go further by showing a huge red warning message to all website visitors when they detect a “not secure” connection, which could quite easily frighten visitors away from websites. This could have huge implications to your business.
What is a Secure Connection?
A “secure” connection is usually denoted with one of those little green locks that you see next to the URL in the browser, and the URL itself starts with https:// instead of http://.
If your website collects any kind of personal information (including email addresses on your opt-in pages) you should seriously consider switching your website over to a secure connection so that your visitors won’t be scared by a warning message from Google Chrome.
Useful Resources About Secure Connections
Here are some resources that may help you with the process of converting your site over to a “secure” connection:
1. Here’s an article on Google’s Security Blog titled “Moving Towards A More Secure Web“.
2. Below is video from Google that dispels some of the old myths about https.
3. Here’s an article that offers advice on how to enable HTTPS on your servers from Google.
SEO Benefits For Having a Secure Connection
Another reason why you should consider switching your websites over to a secure connection (https://) is that a number of recent SEO studies have found that websites that use a secure connection actually tend to have higher search engine rankings than websites that don’t use a secure connection.
In order to enable a secure connection on your website you’ll need to get a special certificate that is issued by a Certificate Authority (CA).
There are many Certificate Authorities that will charge hundreds, even thousands of pounds for a “secure connection” certificate.
However, last year a non-profit group started a “Let’s Encrypt” project where they offer “free, automated, and open Certificate Authority” for your website, so, you may want to check out the free “Let’s Encrypt” before you hand over you hard earned cash for a certificate from someone else.
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