If your company has a website you may have heard of recent talks about Google prioritising HTTPS over HTTP. To this you may be thinking what’s the difference? and why do I need HTTPS?
What is HTTPS?
HTTPS is a secure way to load a website from a server by encrypting the user data to prevent anyone other than the browser and server being able to view the data. This is great to prevent a user’s personal details getting into unwanted hands and therefore making the web a safer place.
Due to HTTPS capabilities Google is in the planning process of pushing all sites to going secure and making the web a safer place. This means if you do not have HTTPs your rankings will soon be punished in the SERPS.
Advantages
SEO
Google’s new movement towards SSL is getting more and more impactful. At the moment HTTPS is only a small ranking factor giving you a slight boost in the SERPS world. But, Google have already laid out plans to increase the impact of HTTPS over HTTP and it is always best to stay ahead of Google to get ahead in the SERPS.
Trust
When you have a correctly set up SSL you are awarded a green padlock. Therefore, when asking users to input their personal data they can be confident that it is going to a safe place that they can trust.
Security
HTTPS connections are established between a server and a user’s computer through a private key. This private key is then necessary to encrypt the data. Therefore this means that the data cannot be intercepted by a third party, further ensuring that only the intended recipient can read the data.
Getting a SSL certificate on your site
Talk to your hosting company.
Most hosting companies these days will install an SSL certificate free of charge. Once installed the rest will be over to you or the developers.
Fixing ‘Mixed Content’ errors.
Once you have installed the SSL certificate to your website you will need to go through and make sure that you have a green padlock on each page. In most cases you may notice that instead of a green padlock you may get a yellow or even red padlock. This is due to the website loading content over HTTP rather than HTTPS. To solve this talk to us or your developer who will be able to fix this for you.
Duplicate Content
When you have added a SSL certificate to your site Google will index both your HTTP pages as well as your HTTPS pages on their next site crawl. This will therefore mean that your website will be indexed twice, leading to duplicate content. Therefore, to stop Google flagging your pages for duplicate content you will need to 301 redirect all of your HTTP pages to HTTPS.
Need a hand?
If you need a hand setting up your SSL talk to us today and we can help get your site secure.
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