Why You Must Secure Your Website with TLS

Besides TLS simply hardening your website against hackers, Google now downgrades your site’s PageRank if it’s not secure.

Security isn’t an option on today’s websites. It’s a necessity. Google confers on sites that use HTTPS a higher search ranking. And who doesn’t want a higher PageRank? But, wait there’s even more reason to lock down your site. Google will soon start marking websites that don’t use HTTPS first as insecure, then as broken. You so don’t want to go there.

To be exact, Google stated: “To help users browse the web safely, Chrome indicates connection security with an icon in the address bar. Historically, Chrome has not explicitly labeled HTTP connections as non-secure. Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.”

Then, as 2017 progresses Google will increase the severity of its HTTP warnings, beginning with labeling HTTP pages as “not secure” in Incognito mode. Eventually, Google will label all HTTP pages as non-secure and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle that it uses for broken HTTPS...