Did you know that Google places a big red “Not Secure” warning in the Chrome address bar of your website if your URL doesn’t start with https:// ?
They issued this warning on ALL websites that have a form, even if it’s just a form with one field asking for an email address. Yep.
Now, Google isn’t doing this just to be meanies or to make our lives more difficult. In fact, quite the opposite. They’re doing it to make the bad guys’ lives more difficult by ensuring there is a high level of security provided for the information shared with your website by your visitors, even if it’s just an email address. That’s the main reason, anyway.
The benefit to owning an SSL-enabled website is not only do you establish trust by protecting your website visitors information – but Google nicely rewards websites that have an SSL certificate by boosting your page rankings in search results. Win-win!
How to tell if your website has SSL
When visiting a website with SSL, you’ll see some differences in the browser’s display that let you know that you’re on a secure website.
1. The URL says “https://” and not just “http://”.
2. You’ll see a green padlock icon in the browser address bar. It looks like this:
Depending on your browser you can see it either on the left- or right-hand side of the browser address bar. Click on the padlock to get more information about the website and the company that provided the certificate.
Because our goal at RE is to produce websites of the highest caliber, we will now include an SSL certificate for every website we build and launch for our clients. Enabling SSL places your website in the best position of trust with your visitors as well as provides improved search engine optimization for your website. RE is also working with all of our current clients without an SSL certificate to go ahead and enable SSL on their websites as soon as possible.
Google explains what these icon indicators mean:
Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or would like our help to install an SSL certificate on your website.
Learn more about SSL:
How & Why to Make Your Website More Secure
A Beginner’s Guide to SSL: What It Is & Why It Makes Your Website More Secure
