Why We Recommend SSL
It's now more important than ever to run your website over SSL for security and that little bit of bonus Google ranking.
There are many reasons to move your site to running over HTTPS, here are a few of our favourites and perhaps most important ones.
"Not Secure" Browser Warnings
From around January this year (2017) Chrome started putting warnings in the URL bar about the level of security on a site. Chrome marks non-secure pages containing password and credit card input fields as Not Secure in the URL bar. Now, if you've been running a site with forms on without SSL then you really do need to sort that out and get a certificate as soon as possible.
However, all sites that don’t run over HTTPS show an exclamation point on the bar, regardless of whether there is a form on the page. We think that's not a good look for your business.
You can see the New Zealand Herald site suffers from this (as at November 2017), I'm sure they are looking into it while we browse their excellent site.
Search Ranking
Google has announced that it now gives (a little) weighting to sites that run over HTTPS over those that don't. They tell us that for now it's only a very lightweight ranking signal, carrying less importance than other signals such as quality content but this is Google, they can change that at any point as we know they are very keen for all website owners to switch to HTTPs.
Over time, we may decide to strengthen it [the ranking signal], because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.
Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts
Times are Changing
It seems Half of page 1 Google Results are now HTTPS. If all the leading sites on the web are now implementing HTTPS then that should be prompting you to think why are they doing it - there must be some very good reasons.
We think security and privacy is critical and should no longer be considered optional so we advocate for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.
How to use HTTPs
Obtaining and implementing a certificate is not complex or expensive but there is a process involved and it can be a little technical. Feel free to talk to us if you want help making your web site secure.