Starting in October 2017, Google’s Chrome browser will start showing “NOT SECURE” warnings to visitors on sites which are not HTTPS.

For a while now, Google has been encouraging website owners to move to HTTPS to help keep the web more secure. First, they gave sites which use HTTPS a small SEO boost as an incentive to switch. Now, they’re adding scary looking warnings as a disincentive to stay with HTTP. Other browsers such as Firefox are doing the same.

How do you switch to HTTPS?

Step 1. Purchase a security certificate:

  • Option 1: Through your web host. This is the easiest and simplest option to set up. Typical cost is under $100US.
  • Option 2: Through a free SSL provider. Most hosts (conveniently) make this option incredible hard to use…
  • Option 3: Through CloudFlare’s free Flexible SSL option. This means visitors to CloudFlare will get an HTTPs connection, but CloudFlare itself connects to your own site through HTTP (then updates the URLs), which isn’t always ideal.

Step 2. Get us to correctly and comprehensively switch your site over to HTTPS:

Contact us and we’ll sort you out in approximately one hour: Redirecting everything nicely for SEO and so there are no broken links, reconnecting Jetpack (if needed) and checking to see whether there are any insecure parts left over to update, e.g. external images, scripts in your posts or widgets etc.

A side-effect of switching to HTTPs

You will lose your social media sharing counts (not buttons) which may be important to you if you show these on your site. We are not aware of any way of changing URLs while retaining social counts. There used to be methods that would work, but Facebook, in particular, changed their methods and there really isn’t anything you can do about it, unfortunately.

The popular Warfare Plugin Social Share Count Recovery was once highly recommended to solve this problem, however, they now say that they can’t guarantee recovery for anything but Pinterest and LinkedIn.

Ready to switch to HTTPs?

Contact us now. Our fee is $100US per website.

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