By Derek Ashauer
A while back Google made a call for “HTTPS everywhere”. They want the web to be a much more secure place. Anything you use on Google.com is done of HTTPS, meaning the page you are accessing is secure.
Before this announcement, HTTPS (or having an SSL certificate) was used just on e-commerce sites or other sites where a user would submit sensitive data such as credit card information or important, personally identifying information. If you had just a content-only site, even with a basic web form, having your site under HTTPS was seen as a bit overkill. Until now.
Why does HTTPS matter?
It is nice to run your site under HTTPS and give your users a little extra comfort knowing that any information they submit on your site is being done securely. It may actually have an impact on the number of people that reach out to you.
But in all honestly, the real answer: because we are all slaves to Google and they say it matters. Whether or not your site is accessed via HTTPS is one of many ranking signals Google uses to determine where to place your site in the search engine results. Using HTTPS won’t suddenly jump your site in the rankings as quality content is still significantly more important, but if you are in a competitive field online then you need every small advantage you can get. Google says right now it is a small signal, but an update in the future could change that and make it much more important.
Want to make your website secure?
Contact us and we can help get your site secured. It’s a pretty simple process and works on any web server.