Background

You have probably been told when buying something from a website you should always check the padlock is displayed next to the website address in the URL indicating a website is secure.

Technically this means that data transferred from your browser to the site’s server is encrypted and cannot be intercepted along the way.  Vitally imporant if you are asking customers to enter their credit card informaion but maybe not so obvious if you are not.

Over the last couple of years it has become common for website that have no ecommerce functionality to also display the padlock symbol.  This is becuase Google indicated in 2014 that it was going to give preference to secure sites and as of July 2018 Google chrome is marking site without HTTPS as Non Secure. Google has also started to rank secure sites above non secure sites.  Although this is thought to be a small ranking factor.

Every little helps in the Google Ranking world and it is important your customers feel they are on a secure and professional website. So how do you change your site from http to https?

Steps

Check Your Site

An easy check to see if your site is secure is double click on the URL (the www part at the top of the browser) and see if it starts with https:// (secure) or http:// (not secure) – if you are already secure then today’s step is complete!

Review Your Hosting Options

Your hosting company will often have a SSL option.  This stands for Secure Socket Layer and is the feature that makes the S in https:// appear.  Turning this on will often immedately give your website additional security.

We use siteground as our hosting company and their SSL option screen is shown below they also have an option within their WordPress installs that allow you to redirect any pages or images to the secure version of the site.  This is really important as it means that all your social share counts, citations and links to your pages stay.