The advantages of migrating your website to HTTPS
2017 is the Year of HTTPS, or rather the Year you cannot longer afford to ignore the need to migrate your website to HTTPS. This is especially true for eCommerce sites and all those that collect sensitive visitor’s data, such as personal information, credit card details, etc.
Google has indicated that HTTPS is a very important factor of its search results algorithm, and Google’s Chrome browser is starting to “shame” non-HTTPS websites that store visitors’ data by flagging them as insecure. Their long-term plan is to have Chrome show a Not Secure warning for all pages served over HTTP, regardless of whether or not the page contains password and credit card input fields.
HTTPS encrypts the data sent between the devices used to browse the Internet and the web servers that host the websites users visit, making it substantially more difficult for a third party to monitor any browsing activity and web interaction. While HTTPS cannot hide the fact that you are visiting a particular website, it will reduce the ability to track your actions within that particular domain. Security is also improved because the protocol sanitizes many of the vulnerabilities hackers commonly exploit to insert their malicious code into websites.
Additionally, many of the latest web technologies such as the SPDY and HTTP2 protocols or ServiceWorker scripts, can only be made available via encrypted HTTPS pages. By implementing HTTPS Web Developers are able to take advantage of these new features, resulting in websites with significant faster load times, secure interactions and enhanced user experience.
One of the latest major websites to migrate to HTTPS has been Stack Overflow. You can read about their long journey to HTTPS at https://nickcraver.com/blog/2017/05/22/https-on-stack-overflow/. It makes for a very interesting read if you want to delve into the technicalities involved on deploying HTTPS on such a huge website, with different sections where users can upload images or specify URLs, different Ad networks implementations, and complications derived from hosting from a single Data Center (latency), and having hundreds of domains at multiple levels (certificates).
Of course your mileage may vary substantially if your website is composed of just a few pages, in which case it maybe a case of just switching to the new protocol after making sure all elements of your page point to the new URL, but in any case it is important to understand at least the basics of what you’re doing and preferably test your new HTTPS deployment on a staging site before you finally switch to the new protocol.
Or you can just let RackNine’s Support team handle the entire website migration to HTTPS process and leave to us looking after all the technicalities involved. It’s our job to make sure the migration of your website is done properly and with the least amount of downtime. Please contact us for more details.
Additionally we’ve made SSL certificates available for all the domains hosted on our servers, and started to issue certificates automatically after a new domain is registered with us. All certificates will be renewed automatically as long as the domains are kept hosted on our servers.
You will still need to configure your site to use our issued SSL certificate, whether it involves configuring a WordPress site to use HTTPS, or making the required edits on the .htaccess file. If any of this seems like too complicated, please do not hesitate to contact us and we´ll be glad to help.