As more and more people grow comfortable transacting on the web, we also see a growing number of websites falling prey to cyber attacks. Learning how to make a website HTTPS has become even more important today. If you want to retain customer loyalty, you have to ensure that your website is capable of protecting the data it contains. With more than half of internet traffic coming from automated sources such as hacking tools, spammers, scrapers and impersonators, you don’t want to leave your website without proper security.
Hackers target customer data
One of the reasons why it’s important to have an HTTPS website is because hacked websites can affect your customers directly. Not only do they take customer data, they can also infect user devices with malware and viruses, continue to hack your website visitors long after they have left your website.
Business reputation is affected when your website is not secure
It’s difficult to trust a website that is unsecure. Customers are more mindful about the sites they visit these days. If you don’t make site HTTPS, you run the risk of turning clients away. People know better than to transact with unsecure pages due to the proliferation of identity theft cases.
Unsecure pages can also affect SEO. If you look at Google Webmaster Tools HTTPs is also considered a ranking signal. Google and other search engines frown on unsecured websites. High risk websites typically lose their high search engine rankings because search engines would want to serve users with quality content from reputable websites. The absence of proper security certificates on a website is a red flag against your brand’s credibility.
Website clean ups can cause unnecessary downtimes
When you’re running an online business, you cannot afford to be unavailable for long periods. Automated hackers and malicious software target websites and render them inaccessible to customers. This will require you to put your website down for hours, even days to clean it up or get somebody to clean the site up of malware. Most website services offer this at an extra charge. Ultimately, it becomes less expensive to make a site HTTPS than cleaning an already infected site. Prevention is always better than cure.
Your website can get blacklisted
An unsecure site can get penalized by Google. When Google finds that your website is potentially causing malware and information breaches on its users, it can take your pages off its search results lists. If you want to build your online visibility, the last thing you need is to get in Google’s bad list.
Google quarantines thousands of suspicious websites every day. You probably have come across these sites at least once. You can recognize them by the display message that says “This site may harm your computer”. You will also get a warning page saying the same thing instead of getting directed to the page.
You risk losing 95% of your organic traffic if your website is blacklisted. Once this happens, you’ll have to go through a whole process of appealing your website’s status with Google. This starts by cleaning your site and then finally installing security measures.
How to make a site HTTPS
On Strikingly, you can make a site HTTPS by simply enabling this option on the settings page. This service comes for free. The platform has a partnership with Let’s Encrypt so that users can get SSL activated on their site without incurring any overhead costs. There’s also no need for you to go through an entire process of purchasing a separate security certificate. If you have any further inquiries, please feel free to contact us at support@strikingly.com or chat with us.
