Google Chrome “not secure” warning coming soon

Google is now really pushing ahead with their plans to make the web secure, aiming to make https/SSL the default for all websites.

As per this recent blog post from Google, from July 2018, Google will label and popup a warning for all non https:// websites as “not secure”, which doesn’t look good for website credibility, especially if your site has any type of forms, asking for personal data.

We feel this is a good move, as it works to secure data entered by users into websites, so it can’t be read and used between the browser and the website, by baddies, but it will require some work to fix, if your website isn’t already https://

• For Snapfrozen customers, luckily, we provide and have already installed SSL certificates on every domain we host. If you try entering your website, but with https:// instead of http://, this might already work fine, but note a few more things.
• If you have 2 versions of your website available, http and https, Google sees this as duplicate sites and can penalise you for having both of them running. As such, you need to login to your cPanel and create a wildcard re-direct from http:// to https://
• If you were using the http:// version of your site for Analytics, you will need to login to your Google Analytics and change this to https://. This also needs to be done within Google Search Console too.
• If you are using WordPress, or possibly other content management systems, you will also need to login and change the main website URL to https://.
• A further consideration is any “hard coded” internal links, or resources like images which are coded to use http:// these will also bring up errors, so may need to be manually changed.

If this is something you’d like assistance with, please feel free to submit a maintenance ticket, or give us a call on 1300 655 722 and we can advise what needs to be done for your website to run without your users receiving the “not secure” warning.