Why is having a secure website becoming more important?
Identity theft, the unsuspected installation of viruses and ransomware and the dangers of having your bank account raided are all being reported increasingly frequently.
So how do individuals browse the internet safely and how do businesses ensure that their visitors know their website is safe to browse?
The answer is to have safety inbuilt using an HTTPS website address with a SSL (Secure Socket Locker) that ensures that everything on the site is encrypted to protect it from invasion, or hacking, or to install malicious ransom software.
It is almost two years since Google first announced that it would be giving a slight ranking priority to secure websites (those whose URLs are HTTPS, and not HTTP) in its search results.
Since the start of 2017 the Google Chrome browser has been marking all HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure. Eventually it will apply this notification to all non HTTPS sites.
This year, the browser Mozilla Firefox has also started marking non-secure sites with a security warning.
For website visitors the secret’s in the padlock
Having security in place has been a condition of many online payment systems, such as Paypal, so that people shopping online for goods or services can be confident that their bank account and payment card details cannot be stolen.
Sooner or later this condition will be required for all websites.
According to a blog from Google published in October 2016 their studies have shown that that users do not perceive the lack of a “secure” icon as a warning, but also that users become blind to warnings that occur too frequently.
If you are browsing online, you can easily check on a site’s security. Look at the top of the site next to the address bar and you should see a symbol of a padlock. If the padlock has a red line through it, you are not visiting a secure website.
Eventually, Google says it plans to label all HTTP pages as non-secure, and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle it currently uses for broken HTTPS URLs.
What does this mean for businesses?
Consumers and clients generally now expect to see a website as part of the marketing for just about any business and are likely to search for it to find out more about their products and services at a time convenient to them.
No business will want to be seen as in any way untrustworthy, so it is worth considering converting an existing website from HTTP to HTTPS if the business is not yet at the stage of planning a new website. However, it is important to remember that all pages from the existing website should be redirected to the new, secure, HTTPS identification, otherwise they risk not being visible in a browser.
In time, of course, it is likely that Google will rank insecure websites less favourably, making it less easy for a business’ website to be found in its search lists.
The last thing a business needs is for its competitors to be visible higher up the lists than itself, so it is worth talking to your website developer to convert to a secure site and make sure it is done properly.
