Online Safety SSL Certificates and Google

Change is on the horizon for how Google handles websites with & without SSL certificates

As of July 2018, Google’s Chrome browser marks all non-HTTPS sites as ‘not secure’!

Your website may not have changed recently, but Google Chrome has. The new version of Google Chrome was released this summer and may well have an impact on the visitors to your site

Secure websites utilise an SSL certificate. This is what changes the HTTP at the start of a web address to HTTPS (plus a ‘lock symbol), and lets people know the website they are browsing is secure and trust worthy.

Google Chrome now displays ‘not secure’ in the address bar of any website that isn’t using SSL and the other web browsers will very likely follow suit fairly soon.

How Could This Affect You?

In recent times people are becoming more and more aware of the need for online security and so a notice stating ‘not secure’ in your address bar is likely to scare away a number of potential customers.

In future, Google intends to mark the insecure notice in red, which will go even further towards driving visitors away.

In order to further encourage the use of SSL certificates google is now ranking those ‘with’, above those ‘without’ and so if you are not ‘secure’ you may well see a slide in your position on google!

What should you do?

Fortunately adding an SSL certificate to your website is a fairly straight forward undertaking for a competent web design company based in Winchester like Duck Feet and so if you would like to discuss how we can help with this just get in touch and we’ll see that you are secure in no time.