Google, HTTPS & The Future of Web Security

Google has drawn a line in the virtual sand, revealing its plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure in Chrome starting in Jan. 2017.

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Sites that transmit passwords or credit cards that still use HTTP at that time will be marked as 'non-secure' and throwing those that have not adopted the protocol into a digital tailspin.

HTTPS is obviously more secure than HTTP and can protect users from a variety of security issues including content injection, mad-in-the-middle attacks and a host of other data modification threats. Adoption of the protocol however has been somewhat slow among smaller websites.

The January date caps off over two years of attention to HTTPS for Google. Back in Aug. 2014 the search engine's algorithm began treating sites with encryption better (providing a slight ranking boost) and it started indexing HTTPS pages by default in late 2015.

Currently, more than half of Chrome desktop page loads are served over HTTPS according to Google and they obviously are aiming to get the percentage closer to 100 percent.

Is your website using the HTTPS protocol?

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