Tuesday 24th July 2018 is a big day, it’s “HTTPS” day  – the day when the latest version of Google’s Chrome web browser (Chrome 68) starts to flag websites that don’t use a Secure Certificate (HTTP) as “Not Secure”.

(What is a Secure Certificate and how they work – October 2017 blog post)

Although Chrome is the first browser to do this explicitly, it’s a pretty big deal. This is because more than 60% of us use Chrome as our web browser.

As a result, it’s likely that Firefox and Safari (Apple) will follow suit soon.

Just think of the impact this might have visitors to your website if one of the first things they see is the “Not Secure” message. It could easily push them towards one of your competitors.

Google has been talking about implementing this for over 2 years. Despite this a regular scan, carried out by Cloudflare, shows that more than 500,000 of the top million websites (as measured by Alexa) still don’t use HTTPS. Some these are in the UK, including many high profile sites, such as:

• Daily Mail *
• Sky Sports*
• Cambridge University Press*
• Argos*
• Oxford* and Cambridge* universities

We’ve been talking about this for a while now (see our 11 December 2017 blog for example)

Why Should you use a Secure Certificate

Using a secure certificate (HTTPS) means that all data exchanged between your web browser and a website is encrypted. This means that even if any of your data is intercepted there’s no way that a “bad guy” would be able to decode anything. That’s everything, not just credit card details when shopping online.

Using HTTPS tells visitors to your website that you care about their security. It also ensures that Google won’t penalise your website by making it harder to find in search results.

How do you get a Secure Certificate for your Business

Do you know where to get a domain security certificate and correctly install it? Can you set up your web server correctly to redirect all your web visitors to use HTTPS?

Now is a very good time to conduct a security audit of your web site. And we can help.

We are specialists in web security and domain services, and Name Registrars in our own right. We pride ourselves in delivering good, solid and affordable advice and support.

Call us on 0117 370 0777 or contact us via our online form to find out how we can help you secure and grow the Web part of your business.

*Correct at the time of writing