Google's push for websites to become secure is clearly working & HTTPS secure websites have become the new norm. Today more than 8 out of 10 webpages visited by people using Google's Chrome browser are secured with HTTPS.
Given this trend, Google Chrome will soon be dropping the green padlock icon it currently shows in the address bar to indicate a website is secure.
With so many sites now being secure, Google views the green padlock as redundant. Instead what they will be doing is highlighting web pages that are NOT secure. From July they'll be showing the following warning.
And then in October they'll up the ante further and more actively warn people off non-secure pages with a red warning icon and a "Not secure" label in the URL bar.
That is likely to result in such pages experiencing big drops in traffic.
If that doesn't encourage you to switch any non-secure websites you have to HTTPS, then what will?
As we've previously discussed, switching to SSL isn't as difficult or expensive as it once was. If you have a WordPress website one of the easiest ways to do this is do what we did. And that was switching to WPX Hosting.
We've tried numerous hosting companies over the years and WPX stands head and shoulders above the rest. People who use them rave about the service and I just wish we'd known about them earlier. Reasons we recommend them include:
If you're considering using a different web host or want a painless way to move your website to SSL, I recommend you check out WPX Hosting.
