I like to challenge myself each month on weird stuff. This month I’ve challenged myself to produce a video each day that is short yet informative, educational, and actionable.
Here’s Day 3
HTTPS is a Google Ranking Factor!
That means better SEO. HTTPS also means a more secure internet for all those involved. Google is now actively telling viewers when a site isn’t secure. In the future they are going to aggressively label them.
Should you convert to https? If you have an IDX inside your website you might want to wait on that. Here’s why…
HTTPS – that additional S stands for SECURE. That means that everything that you submit to the website is uploaded encrypted. That means that anyone ‘listening’ will get a garbled bunch of data that they can’t do anything with. That’s a good good thing for a regular site and it’s a MUST HAVE for anything that asks for a username, password, credit card, social security number and so on.
That’s why all the major sites you are today are HTTPS. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and of course your bank are all SECURE for that reason.
How they become secure is easy. All they need is a valid SSL Certificate and a Dedicated IP.
Security is a Daisy Chain
A Daisy Chain means that one thing relies on another thing and then next thing relies on that. One break in the chain and the whole thing falls apart. Remember old fashioned christmas lights where one bulb would go out the whole string would then too? They were wired as a Daisy Chain!
HTTPS relies on everything inside of it also being secure. In Programmer Speak, that means that anything that calls from an outside source, that source also needs to be secure. If I upload a picture it’s loaded into my WP-CONTENT folder of my website. If my SSL Cert says that my whole site is secure then that picture is secure too.
In that picture above here’s what that code looks like. You can see it’s calling the picture from an https. You can also click on the image. I have it so it’ll open up in a new window and check the URL.
However if instead I was pulling an image from a non secure source that might look like
<img src=”http://somewebsite.com/image123.jpg> and that lack of https would break the daisy chain. Does that make sense?
If you have a real estate website chances are you also have an IDX for property searches. Now that you know a little more about HTTPS look when you upload your next listing. It’ll be on a HTTPS server. The problem though is that most MLS’s have a public side that is not secure (HTTP). It’s this that the IDX is pulling from. So an IDX inside your site will break the daisy chain of security.
Conclusion: You don’t have to switch to HTTPS right now if you don’t want to and more importantly, if you have an IDX that is not secure you cannot make the switch yet even if you wanted to. You’ll have to wait till the MLS IDX people get their acts together first.
Is there a topic you’d like to see me cover?
Check out the entire series!
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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