Welcome to part 1 of our 3 part blog series where we are taking a look at HTTPS and its impact on your website’s SEO

What is HTTPS and why your website needs it

There has been a lot of talk lately online about HTTPS and HTTP and the importance of having the first one over the latter!

So in the first part of our HTTPS series we are going to be chatting about what is HTTPS and why Your Website Needs it.

For those who don’t know they make up part of your domain URL and its what lets the internet know whether or not you website connection is encrypted.

WHAT IS HTTPS?

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and HTTPS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure.

In other words HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP. The ‘S’ stands for Secure. It ensures secure communication between a user’s browser and a server.

Your website URL will either have either one or the other.

WHY DOES YOUR WEBSITE NEED HTTPS?

For a long time most website only had HTTP as unless you were selling and taking card payments from your website then that was more than enough and saved you from having to by an SSL certificate and set it up on your site.

However that has all changed as Google have now said that ranking preference will now be given to websites that have HTTPS over those with HTTP.

So essentially Google Is Forcing You to Switch to HTTPS by October or you will lose rankings.

If you have set up Search console then Google are in the process of sending out emails to all Search Console users to tell them that if you have a non-HTTPS website, then you will have to you switch to HTTPS by October or you risk losing traffic.

Not only that if any chrome users search for or try to access your site then a “NOT SECURE” notification pop-up on your website, which is the last thing you want as it will diminish trust in your website and you before they have even had a chance to see what you have to offer.

WHY NOW GOOGLE?

So why are Google making this push? In a nutshell its because HTTPS is safe and HTTP isn’t

To put it as plainly as possible, the reason for Google’s drive towards HTTPS is all about website security.

At the beginning of the year, Google sent out notifications that secure-data must be secured. In other words sites that collect customer data such as credit-card information and even personal information.

However it wasn’t limited to just these sites and was indicative of Google’s drive towards online security and user experience.

HTTP allows unauthorized people to access your computer and puts your valuable information at risk of being stolen.

Google wants to avoid that by strongly encouraging the shift to HTTPS.

So what to do if your website isn’t HTTPS ? You need to set up an SSL certificate on your website, this will turn your HTTP into HTTPS.

In the second part of our HTTPS series we will be going over how and where you can purchase your SSL.

I can’t stress the importance of this enough, you don’t want your rankings to plummet and your trust rating to fall so you will want to make sure your site is HTTPS before October rolls round! 

Therefore we will be chatting about the full impact of the HTTPS switch on your Google Rankings during the third and last instalment of our blog!

So make sure you have signed up to one of our mailing lists to get notifications of each of these vital blog updates. And Thank you for reading the first blog in our series what is HTTPS and why Your Website Needs it.