As a website owner, we know that your reputation is one of the most important assets of your business and brand. It’s *really* important that people trust you and your business, right?
Well, there’s an important change coming down the pike that has some big implications for a large share of your users.
Google is starting to flag web pages with a rather prominent message in their Chrome web browser for all pages that are not served over secure https connection: the message shows up in red letters in the address bar at the top of the browser, accompanied by an exclamation point.
Definitely gets one’s attention!
This is not something you want your Chrome browser visitors — especially new ones — seeing as they stumble upon your site.
But wait: how many people actually use Chrome as their browser of choice?
The answer is a whopping 60% 1. It depends on your particular audience of course, but that’s potentially a huge chunk of your visitors.
Graph/Image Source: https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx
But I’m not doing e-commerce or collecting credit card information, so this doesn’t affect me, right?
Nope, not true! Google has been displaying warnings about insecure e-commerce checkout pages for a while now. And this is an extension of that effort, impacting the vast majority of business websites, e-commerce or not.
At the time of this writing, any page that has form input of any kind is going to be marked as “Insecure” if not served over https. So this includes opt-in forms, newsletter signups, forums, site logins, or even the simple submit button on your contact form. So if you’ve got a signup or login form on your site at all, then this means you.
All in all, this is actually a good thing for the Internet community as whole, which is exactly why Google is making such a visible and attention-grabbing change. Form data can be easily “sniffed” over an insecure connection. And as you’re probably aware, the Wild Wild West of the Internet is not getting any less wild. Quite the contrary. Hackers and scamsters are getting ever more sophisticated with that methods and techniques. And so we absolutely want to protect your users’ information, even when it’s not a credit card number.
So what to do?
Get your website running over secure https… today. There are many different ways to do this, and there’s a myriad of different platforms and servers out there: so we’re not going to go into all of the technical details here.
But the world has changed with regard to https: it’s now easier than ever to get your site secured by an ssl certificate, often without any additional purchase for the certificate. And it’s no longer the super-slow, performance-killing beast that it was 5 or 10 years ago 2.
Give your web developer a call and have a friendly check-in about setting up your website for secure https. You’ll be glad you did!
And if I don’t have a friendly web developer to set up my SSL certificate?
Reach out to our peaceful team of technical specialists. We’re always happy to assist, especially if it means that this crazy internet world in which we exist gets a bit safer for all.
Feeling Nerdy Today?
For further reading, take a look at these informative articles:
- Mythbusting HTTPS (Great Video from the Progressive Web App Summit 2016)
- Google Chrome is Ramping Up Warnings When You Visit Insecure Websites
- Imminent: Non-HTTPS Sites Labeled “Not Secure” by Chrome
- SSL Certificates, Explained (Video, With Pictures!)
- How to Install an SSL Certificate
To your continued success,
~ Lawrence & Ben
& Your Friends at Peaceful Media
