Is Your Website Trustworthy?

An easy fix becomes a badge of honor

As a professional service provider, you rely on trust as an important part of your brand. The most secure place for your brand is your website, but if you have not yet switched to HTTPS, both may be in jeopardy. With recent browser changes, websites built before 2016 may appear insecure or vulnerable. No prospective client will risk exploring an at-risk website, despite impressive bells & whistles.

HTTPS is an adaptation of the familiar “hypertext transfer protocol” – the HTTP in the location bar on your web browser. The added S is for “secure.” This protocol creates a secure channel over the Internet, which is fundamentally not secure. The extra security was initiated several years ago to protect e-commerce, financial transactions and online shopping. That little padlock in your browser implies safe online purchases. HTTPS works by encrypting the data being transferred, authenticating the user, and ensuring that the data cannot be altered or corrupted during transmission. The process involves an SSL, “Secure Socket Layer” certificate that comes from your website hosting company or web designer.

Recent changes in Google’s Chrome browser have shown a preference for websites served via HTTPS. This means that if you don’t convert to HTTPS, your website may be labelled “Unsecure site” in Google searches. As an added bonus for the vigilant, Google has announced that HTTPS websites will be given improved search ranking over unsecured sites, even providing guidelines for moving sites to HTTPS.

Does this give you a headache? We can take care of it for you, easily and inexpensively.

The use of HTTPS is expanding. Government and business websites have been employing HTTPS to protect from unauthorized downloading and malicious activity, and Google has actively encouraged website developers and owners to switch to HTTPS. Google Chrome has had a “not-secure” warning in their browser for some time. As of October 2017, additional warnings are being displayed on sites with login fields and data collection forms.

As a standard practice going forward, we are building sites using HTTPS exclusively. As part of our 2018 website launch Best Practices, we will walk clients through the purchase of the SSL Certificate and do all the necessary configuration of existing WordPress sites to ensure a secure connection. Or you can do it yourself.

Contact us to safeguard your site.