The best reason for switching to HTTPS is that you are making your website more secure. It can safeguard your data and your customer’s data, and bring you the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you’re protected from other problems such as malicious ads or spyware, that can ruin your sites reputation.
What is HTTPS?
HTTPS is a secure version of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the ‘S’ stands for secure.
It’s a method for ensuring secure communication between a user’s browser and a web server. It is often recognised as showing a green address bar or padlock in the browser window to indicate a secure connection. This prevents hackers from grabbing any of your data.
The SEO Value
If your domain has the letters ‘https’ in front of your web address then your site will have a mass advantage over those that still have ‘http’. This fact comes directly from Google. Between January and October last year, the number of sites that appeared in the top slot of Google searches that were https compliant rose from 25% to 40%.
The reason why the Google algorithm increasingly prefers HTTPS is that the company wants to prioritise secure websites. In fact, Google has been open about its desire to ensure that one day the whole web is secure, including sites that are not handling sensitive information. Google even updated Chrome earlier this year so that Chrome users would receive a security warning every time they access a site served by HTTP and not HTTPS. This severely disadvantages HTTP sites.
Mobile Technology
There is another important advantage in switching to HTTPS. No serious modern business can afford to overlook mobile technology. Making sure that your site is mobile-friendly by considering such factors as page loading speed, is as crucial to success in the modern marketplace as employing the latest in SEO strategy.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is becoming an increasingly important part of optimising your domain for smartphones. Google created AMP to help speed up loading times on mobile devices, and AMP content tends to appear more prominently in search results, but it can only work with sites that use HTTPS. This is also increasingly the case for the new generation of browsers and progressive web apps, which are designed with HTTPS in mind and won’t be effective with HTTP.
So, should you switch?
Yes. Your website gets a massive advantage over others, and will rank much higher on Google. You also have the benefit of a secure website, which is very important.
You can also find out what is good about your Security for your website and what isn’t by using our free website test.