Have you made the change to HTTPS? If not, it’s time that you do. Google is making it less and less desirable to have a plain old HTTP site, encouraging security and privacy for all.
For some time now, Google has been saying that it considers HTTPS as a metric for determining for page ranking, giving preference to HTTPS pages over HTTP pages. That means, all things being equal, a page using the HTTPS protocol will rank higher on Google rankings than a page unsecured with only an HTTP protocol.
But another change is that the Google Chrome web browser has started displaying an error page with a warning in the address bar that the visitor is on an insecure site. Chrome already does this for pages that have an incorrectly configured SSL certificate.
This is what this error looks like in action:
Pretty scary looking, huh? This is definitely not ideal if you plan on building a sense of trust with your donors or association members!
So do you need to make the pivot from HTTP to HTTPS? If that error message alone didn't sway you, we have some additional reasons. We say “yes,” for all of these reasons.
“Intruders exploit unprotected communications to trick your users into giving up sensitive information or installing malware, or to insert their own advertisements into your resources. For example, some third parties inject advertisements into websites that potentially break user experiences and create security vulnerabilities."
“Intruders exploit every unprotected resource that travels between your websites and your users. Images, cookies, scripts, HTML … they’re all exploitable. Intrusions can occur at any point in the network, including a user’s machine, a Wi-Fi hotspot, or a compromised ISP, just to name a few.”