For the last week in all my free time (ha ha) I’ve been working on…
- Migrating the site to a new server.
- Making it Secure.
With a site this large it’s been a huge struggle in the migration but everything is functioning properly on the new server – yay! The exciting part is that AreWeConnected.com is now Secure.
Obviously, that’s the little s at the end of http. Don’t worry, you don’t have to type that in, it’ll automatically go there.
WHY DID I DO IT?
One of the first reasons is that I started a new service of Managed WordPress Hosting and for various reasons behind the scenes I needed a secure area. Since I was doing that already I thought why not make the whole site secure?
Here’s a few other reasons why that makes sense.
OTHER REASON #1:
Back on August 6, 2014 Google had a small article on their security blog that mentioned their using “HTTPS as a ranking signal“.
In that little post they said, “…over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”
Google is https, so is Facebook, so is Linkedin, so is DropBox, so is YouTube and so is every single website you trust.
OTHER REASON #2:
Another reason to go https is that right now if you look at the url in your browser you’ll see a little green lock or something similar. If I didn’t mention it you probably wouldn’t have noticed it. That’s the way it’s been for ever. If you did notice the green lock I look at that as positive reinforcement. In the near future browsers are going to change from positive to negative reinforcement and instead, soon both Google & Firefox have stated they’ll mark HTTP sites first as dubious and then as insecure. That sure sounds like negative reinforcement to me!
Can you say EEEEEEK!?! Given those choices which would you want to be?
OTHER REASON #3:
Here’s another reason and it’s called http2. I so know you are going to gloss over this part so I found a simple video to explain it all.
Still all greek to you? That’s ok. There’s so much you don’t need to know and this is one of those things.
Now if you were paying attention, http2 is not https. But the thing is that browsers will only support http2 over https. When this evolution of the web happens I won’t need to switch to https.
To be totally honest, switching to https is a real pain in the a$$. I’ve been hunting down items all over my site that break the secure chain. All you need is one single little image coming from a non https source to break the whole thing. That said, I think I have most all of them. It’s much easier to build a new site on https than it is to adapt an older one but in the end it will all be worth it.
If you are building a new site these days – I would consider doing it in https. There’s too much good stuff coming down the road for you not to.
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one,bought a cool orange one, and still rides a really slow one), he loves strong beer and good red wine.
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