Google Means Business! Sites need to be HTTPS or they are blocked on the web!

Four Years of Planning Brings Success

Google’s vision of a safer and highly secure Internet experience everywhere started back in June 2014 at the Google I/O conference. Ilya Grigorik (Webmaster Trends Analyst) and Pierre Far (Web Performance Engineer) unleashed Google’s intentions for everyone to make the transition to engaging in secure website development. This effort included a detailed explanation of user benefits, best practices and a step-by-step outline of how to make web content more secure with a demonstration of how to switch to the HTTPS standard. Later that year, happy with the results obtained from running tests, Google advanced their initiative to push for ranking preferences for websites that comply with the newly enforced HTTPS security standards. Initially, this effort provided a small boost for HTTPS sites over those that failed to update and get in line with Google’s vision.

By 2017, Google more aggressively flagged websites that accepted password and credit card information if they had not upgraded to being HTTPS compliant. Later that year, Google enforced even more strict flagging measures on non HTTPS sites involved in any form of data entry from users. This included cracking down on sites being visited in incognito mode. 

By February, 2018, Google made its move again, cracking down on any site that failed to comply with the HTTPS standard. For the last four years, Google has been providing website developers with ample time to get behind Google’s effort to make the Internet a safer and more secure domain for information and monetary exchange. Each of the above advancements were an intended measure to facilitate this transition as seamlessly and painlessly as possible. However, website developers that have refused to comply are now finding that Google is no longer waiting for them to catch up with Google’s vision as website after website is now being flagged until it reaches compliance with the security standards Google has ushered in place. The gradual advance of Google’s vision in this area has been Google’s way of telling website developers that they have been warned to get on board or be left behind.

What Is SSL?

The term SSL is a part of the HTTPS protocol that refers to secure sockets layer. It helps to ensure a secure handling of data across servers. Essentially, this concept is fairly straight forward. You want to send information to a recipient, but you do not want everyone else being able to read this information along the way as the information gets passed from server to server. An HTTPS website’s server will generate a certificate to help with authenticating the recipient of the information to protect the data while in transit. The data will be encrypted and it will require an encryption key to crack the cipher to get at the original content intended for the recipient, so they can read it. When this process is executed properly, it helps to guarantee that your transmission is not overly vulnerable to any computer systems that have access to the encrypted files.

The Point of HTTPS Everywhere

In the past, data moved about non-securely on the web. As you can imagine, this created all kinds of problems that lead to the need of a standardized method of handling web-based security procedures and applications. HTTPS protocols are an attempt at standardizing the way security works on the Internet to handle these situations. Growing problems with Internet security have given rise to events and instances that became issues leading up to the EU GDPR. This has provoked the need by many to ensure that data transmissions across the web are handled in a more methodically secure manner to prevent cyber-crime and other nefarious activities online. Perhaps not too surprising to learn but solid encryption methods reside at the heart of this ever-advancing endeavor.

Nsite Tech Studios on Board from the Beginning.

Ever since Google made its vision public and its intentions known, concerning the enforcement of the HTTPS standardization for Internet security, Nsite Tech Studios (NTS) has been solidly on board with seeing this mission through. In fact, NTS’s website design platform is one of the first to help other businesses collaborate and work with Lets Encrypt (the automated and open certificate authority online). The goal of this collaboration is to provide no cost SSL encryption to all the responsive websites on our system that belong to already paid subscribers. It is our goal to make this available to better ensure that your customer’s data is not left vulnerable to aggressive cyber threats and malicious individuals taking advantage of other less secure data transmissions on platforms where the HTTPS security protocols are not being as strongly enforced as they should be.

Removing Barriers

In the past, there were numerous barriers that made it difficult for website developers to easily get HTTPS security measures in place. First, the cost of SSL certificate services from a provider were rather expensive. This was a huge turn off to small businesses who were struggling to make ends meet as it was. Today, these concerns are less of a problem with various companies providing low cost or free SSL certificate services. Do not forget that speed was an issue too. SSL procedures were clunky and made website loading stall and slow down considerably.

Today, new approaches to integrating and handling SSL certificate issues has made this process operate significantly faster. Then there was the problem of having to install these security measures manually. For small business owners having a difficult enough time putting a website in place and managing it, not having the technical know-how to manually install such security measures was more than overwhelmingly frustrating. 

Today, this has all been replaced with one click approaches to getting everything installed and set up. Even automatic certificate renewal has been introduced to make managing your SSL service so much easier, and the NTS platform offers all these perks for your convenience. Without these security measures in place, you are left vulnerable to your information being stolen. This can even be a huge liability to your company both in terms of website ranking and unsecured data transmissions creating the opportunity for their business to be at the heart of litigation proceedings due to cyber threats.

With the proper security helping to keep your business’s online transactions safe and secure, your customers will be able to appreciate engaging in e-commerce transactions in a safe and secure digital environment.