5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should Be Enabled On Your Website

HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, which means that the extra S is there for security and safety website features. More precisely, it stands for SSL (Secure Socket Layer), which is a technology that is used to encrypt your connection to a site. This way, the login data exchanged between you and a website is kept safe from someone stealing it.

It also means that HTTPS is used to ensure the safety of customer data, which is particularly important if your website is accepting online payments.

In this article, we are going to discuss the reasons why you simply need to enable HTTPS on your website.

It’s a great solution for your business

The role of SSL is to prevent the so-called “a man in the middle attack”, which is basically monitoring and altering a communication between two parties by someone who is unauthorized to do so. HTTPS is therefore very important for a business that has a login functionality or asks for credit card information. With hacking being a modern plague, people want to know that your company is doing the best it can in order to make the private information safe from being hijacked or altered. When you see a broken padlock icon in the browser bar, it now instills doubt.

It is good for search

It’s now a fact stated by Google that a website with HTTPS enables gets a higher preference in search results than a site without it. If two results are rated as the same quality, or in other words, your and your competitor’s website are seen as equally good, the one that has HTTPS enabled is going to perform better. So, basically, enabling HTTPS is essential for your SEO efforts as well. Google is aiming at the best user experience, so it is no surprise that this is so.

SSL is required by AMP

You must have at least heard about AMP already. It stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Basically, it’s a technology that makes websites load extremely fast on mobile devices. Google has already stated that in the near future, AMP is going to be an essential SEO factor, which means that every AMP-enabled page is going to rank better. So, in today’s era of smartphones, it is essential that you optimize for mobile. This means fulfilling all the necessary requirements for AMP, including HTTPS being enabled.

Chrome will tag your site as “not secure”

As of this year, Chrome has started tagging any website that is not HTTPS-enabled and asks for users login details as “not secure”. This tag is certain to drive away anyone who might want to shop on your website. While it is a fact that HTTPS is a bit expensive, it’s certainly worth paying for and putting the effort into it. Your client’s data needs to be kept safe and secure. So, according to the advice of experts providing SEO services, if you want your SEO to remain at the same level, no matter the device, you can understand the necessity of enabling HTTPS.

Google is indexing mobile

As previously mentioned, optimizing for mobile is essential. Google has already begun to roll out mobile-first indexing, which is now essential for your SEO strategy, as its algorithms will focus on mobile versions of websites in order to rank them. With the goal to make mobile sites indexable, they advise that you start following some of the best practices, one of them particularly being – to start moving to a secure site if you don’t as of yet support HTTPS.

Final words

If you don’t secure your website with SSL, your site will be susceptible to various dangers. If you’re not encrypted with HTTPS, the shared information during the login process is very easy to intercept. It’s open to criminals who are looking out for personal information in a number of ways:

• By monitoring Wi-Fi connections, even the locked ones that that can easily break

• By having an inside position at an ISP

• By hacking into routers across the web

They can use the information they get for identity theft and a variety of wrongful actions. By getting a hold of passwords together with email addresses and usernames, they can attempt to use this information to attack other websites with these combinations. Once that info is proven to be usable on a variety of websites, these criminals sell them at different prices, depending on their worth.

Even information that may seem harmless can be misused. This includes email addresses and phone numbers. They can be used for what is called “spear phishing” attacks, which are messages that you seemingly get from a trustworthy source, and which contain a file or a link that has malware attached to it.

** About the Author: Chloe Smith is a business consultant with a passion for writing.