Google Wants Your site Secure? To https or not to https, that is the Question…

Really?  So what is the upside and downside of moving to https as Google is “suggesting”?

 

It sounds techy and it is.  Google is “suggesting” that you should move to https for your website.  What this means is basically you have to buy and apply a properly credentialed https Secure Socket Layer certificate to your visible webiste.

  It the good old days, this was only needed to protect online sales where you were collecting and processing credit cards and personal information, say in the case of a shopping cart process.  Then       this was almost made redundant as banks and online booking engines and even paypal did all the work, but providing the SSL as part of their services to you (for a price)

Now Google wants your whole site secure and they are suggesting two things will happen.  1. Your organic rankings may be affected and 2. Your first time visitors will get a warning message instead of a direct visit to your site if they are in Chrome (Googles own Browser)

Both of these are problematic, and given what the big G is saying, we will be recommending to our clients to go SSL.  However its not quite as simple and as cheap as you would expect.

Here is what is involved in most sites that we manage.

 

1. Buy and apply a properly verified individual SSL certificate (not shared) to the correct folder on your live indexed site (ie, http://www or http://)  Do it to the wrong one and it wont work.

2. Reindex your site on Google webmaster tools and re verify the correct snytax as live ie https

3. Reset your profiles in analytics to reflect the new active domain

4. Ask Google to reindex all your “new pages”  ie now they start with https

5. Change all of your Google adwords URLs in all your ads

6. Update your CMS to reflect the changed pages and fix broken links as needed

7. Monitor and attend to issues as they develop.  Oh and dont forget to update all your email softwares and probably your webmail and email settings.

 

Simple hey?  There will be financial costs on this for everyone, just giving you a heads up so you know before the “deadline” of January next year.

PS here are some of the current types and costs… (courtesy whichssl.com)

 

All Certificates – Low to High Price