5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should Be Enabled on Your Website

Information intelligence is a difficult issue for both online sellers and buyers all over the world. Web security is becoming increasingly important as organizations and web users demand protection over the Internet. This blog explores 5 reasons why HTTPS should be enabled on your website.

If you want to keep your website secure, HTTPS is the most important thing you can do. This brings more benefits to your website than you could have imagined. Beginners frequently make the mistake of failing to enable HTTPS on their website. For the sake of security, everyone is now moving to HTTPS.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is an abbreviation for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, and the extra “s” denote the security and safety features of your website. The “s” on the other hand stands for SSL – Secure Sockets Layer, which is a digital certificate that aids in providing strong encryption and a secure connection to your website.

Why HTTPS is Important?

HTTPS is critical for securing data and communication between the browser and your website. When a customer logs in, login information is exchanged between the browser and the website. Anyone with access to this data can easily steal it. But not if your website is secured with HTTPS. When HTTPS is enabled, the information transfer is encrypted, which means your data is safe.

5 Reasons why HTTPS should be enabled on your Website:

To begin, there are numerous reasons for enabling HTTPS on your website; however, we will only discuss a few of them here-

1. Safer for your Visitors

HTTPS encrypts the data sent between the browser and the user. The SSL encryption layer prevents “man in the middle” attacks by preventing unauthorized users from eavesdropping on and altering data passing between the two. This is especially important to avoid on e-commerce websites where credit card information is entered, as well as on websites that allow account creation and store sensitive information.

Visitors to your website want to know that the information they are sending is secure. In the case of e-commerce sites, not having HTTPS enabled can have an impact on purchase decisions. Any data security issues can have a negative impact on your brand. With so many high-profile stories about data breaches in the news, visitors want to know that the information they are sending through your site is secure.

2. Search Visibility

Google strongly advises website owners to switch to the HTTPS protocol and has issued numerous updates in recent years to encourage them to do so. One of the most significant updates in 2014 was the announcement that HTTPS is now a ranking signal. This signal was very weak at first, but it is expected to grow stronger over time. Since 2015, Google has prioritized HTTPS URLs over HTTP URLs, even if they are not linked to.

By June 2016, Moz discovered that over 32% of page 1 Google results were using the HTTPS protocol, a significant increase since Google first announced it. As stated in the article, while this graph could indicate that Google updates are rewarding HTTPS websites, it could also indicate that Google announcements and recommendations are convincing more and more websites to make the switch.

3. Avoiding the “Not Secure’ Message

The primary reason for enabling HTTPS is to provide perceptible secure encryption for all internal and external data. Due to numerous false and phishing activities that occurred on numerous websites in the past, there has been a lot of criticism about giving credit card information online. 

Now that Google has begun encouraging shoppers to use HTTPS, security alerts in Chrome 56 have been implemented to warn users that HTTP as “Not Secure.” Finally, HTTPS marking is required to run a tenable and attentive secured website on the search engine.

Google, on the other hand, is encouraging other store owners to use a secure connection known as HTTPS. Google is in the mood to call out businesses that are still ignoring the protection of their customers’ sensitive information, despite the fact that HTTPS can reduce the likelihood of man-in-the-middle attacks or surveillance techniques.

4. Essential for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology enables pages to load instantly on mobile devices. Google will index mobile pages in 2017 because mobile devices now account for the majority of web traffic. 

As a result, Google is likely to fetch search results based on the mobile pages of websites, as Google considers the load speed of a website to be a decisive factor in ranking a web page. To summarise, AMP-enabled websites are expected to rank significantly higher than non-AMP websites.

HTTPS is required for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to provide a faster page loading experience. Because you cannot reap the benefits of AMP’s future without HTTPS, it is mandatory to have an SSL certificate to encrypt your mobile website traffic.

5. Better Referral data in Google Analytics

Another reason to switch is that you’ll see more data in Analytics, particularly in the Referral section. A Referral URL identifies the previous website visited by the user before clicking through to your website. This is important information to see because it can tell you more about where your direct traffic is coming from, which is critical for determining link building success. However, if you have a lot of referral traffic that is only showing as Direct, switching to HTTPS may be the solution.

This is due to the fact that secure websites using HTTPS will not send referral data to non-secure websites using HTTP. You may have some great links on secure websites, but because your site is HTTP, they will all be grouped together under the “Direct” traffic source category in Analytics. There is a workaround if the secure website employs a meta referrer tag, but you cannot compel them to do so. As more websites migrate to HTTPS, you may encounter some referral data issues.

Bottom Line

Overall, HTTPS is highly recommended and advised to be safe and strong on the web, with result-generating SEO. Although it is a bit pricey, it is well worth the money! In the virtual world, nothing is more important than the safety and security of your data and information. Hope this blog on “5 Reasons Why HTTPS Should be Enabled on your Website” was helpful. 

We, at SquareBase, can help you to grow your business and touch the heights. We love to help businesses. Contact Us and let’s take your business to a whole other level together!

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