How to Avoid Google Marking Your Site Not Secure

By January 23, 2017Online Security, Web Design
Google Insecure Site SSL HTTPS

In 2015 Google introduced HTTPS (Certificate Secured websites) as a lightweight search signal – meaning having one could give a small positive search engine rankings boost to your website.  The reason for this was to encourage webmasters to get more SSL Certificates for their websites to further improve data security and privacy for online users. Interestingly we note that only one other Wollongong web company has setup a SSL certificate on their website – despite this news almost 2 years ago…

In January 2017 though Google is making a far more important move with regards to websites that are not safeguarded by a SSL Certificate – marking them visually in the browser as an ‘Insecure Site’. But first off what is a SSL Certificate?

What is SSL?

SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, which is a standard encryption technology that is used to transfer information from a user’s browser to a web server. Websites use SSL encryption in order to prevent hackers from intercepting and potentially misusing the data users leave on a website (for instance via a store checkout page, also registration, data submission or even a contact form). SSL largely work by the use of public and private encryption keys – the former (public keys) are used to scramble up the information, and the latter (private keys) then decrypts it so that it could be read by someone monitoring this data transmission.

What Will Google Be Doing?

With coming releases for users on Google’s Chrome browser the former ‘i’ indicator with information on the currently displayed website will change to indicate ‘Not secure’. Primarily this will be seen on pages that accept user inputted data or transfer personal information – such as web store checkouts, password forms or other contact forms etc…

But far from stopping there, future versions of Chrome’s browser will very visibly show a warning on every page of a website without a SSL Certificate:

Why Should We Care?

With a current Market share of browser usage of 56.4%, Google can’t be ignored.

Even if you are not collecting sensitive data, do you want visitors to your website to see a danger sign and ‘Not secure’ in bright red?

That along with the minor boost to search rankings as a ‘reward’ for having a SSL Certificate installed on your website should be enough to encourage all website owners to invest in a SSL Certificate for their website.

We Can Assist You to Install a SSL Certificate

We have already installed approximately 100 SSL Certificates for client’s in the past few months. Please feel free to get in contact with us today (Call: 1300 78 33 11 or Email Us) and we can schedule this upgrade for your website. For January 2017 to encourage as many as possible to invest in this important new requirement we have a special price of $90 ex GST for 1 year of SSL Certificate license including installation (normally $140 ex GST pa).

If you host with us, we can install on your behalf, and if you don’t host with us we simply need your cPanel (or like) details and we can proceed with an install.

About Andrew K

Andrew Kilkenny is director at natiive. He has 20 years of Information Technology experience in eCommerce and Robotic Process Automation systems in the corporate environment and has a passion for helping businesses grow their online web presence. He gets a kick out of helping people maximise their web presences and getting their websites really working for them.