What are the Benefits of HTTPs over HTTP?
Have you moved your website to HTTPS? If not, then you can make the shift as Google has probably considered it as a ranking signal. So, I believe it’s time to redirect your website from HTTP to HTTPs and update all pages with canonical tags or .htaccess file edit, shifting the incoming external links, and deploying the protocol independent URLs. Besides ranking signal, there are other benefits of having HTTPs instead of HTTP.
Provides Website Security and Protection
First, HTTPs plays an essential role in saving your website from hackers. HTTPs provides more web security as compare to HTTP as it uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). So, while deploying HTTPs, you can ensure your website users about the security regarding their personal data (in case they make any online purchase or fill in information at the time of subscribing to your website, newsletter, blog etc.).
For instance, if you own an e-commerce website, it would be most important for you to build credibility and reliability by offering data protection to your online customers as they need to make money transfers for their chosen products or services. In this situation, you must go for HTTPs rather than HTTP.
Secure DNS Infrastructure
Second, HTTPs can offer secure DNS infrastructure to a large extent as compare to HTTP. On the contrary, HTTP does not offer the same level of security about DNS infrastructure.
The encryption in HTTPs provides a number of benefits including integrity, identity, and confidentiality. Moreover, integrity protects the information from being altered without your knowledge. Whereas, lack of encryption in HTTP does not offer you integrity and confidentiality. It means that you are inadvertently giving controls to your keyboard. You can understand in such a way that either you are sharing photos on Facebook (HTTPs) with security controls or giving control to someone to share your photos on Facebook (HTTP).
Higher Security for Browsers
Third, HTTPs offers more security to browsers as compare to HTTP. It means that you can offer fewer opportunities (tracking, attacks etc.) to hackers while using HTTPs as a communication and server channel. For instance, let’s take an example of Facebook. A few years before, Facebook served its login page as HTTP. Hence, the hackers from the Middle East injected a JavaScript to steal the user’s passwords from login page. As a result, Facebook accounts were being compromised as Facebook login page was running on HTTP. After that Facebook implemented HTTPs and they will never move to HTTP for sure!
Conclusion
In the conclusion, I believe that you must use HTTPs over HTTP if you are running e-commerce website(s) or a site where you accept online payments from your visitors. Though, a few years ago, it was expensive and rare, but at present, the situation has turned. Now, you can take a SSL certificate for few dollars. So don’t wait and grab an SSL certificate to offer a secure and hacker-free experience to your customers.
About Ekhlas Uddin Jewel
Ekhlas Uddin Jewel is Google Adwords certified individual & SEO, SEM, SMM specialist from Bangladesh. He is the founder of SEO-Service-Provider.Org. For large SEO/Adwords project(s), please feel free to contact him.
Yes we have moved our website from http to https to get some SEO benefits. Https is much new for upcoming websites. Nice article on https over http
You are welcome Shoikot Mahmud. Good to know that you have moved your website from http to https. Have you faced any trouble after converting http to https? Is there any link drop in webmaster tool? Please let me know.
Hi
Any guidance on what one should do to change over to Https. Like what are the steps to follow to ensure your wp site continues to function.
I guess that question is a complete blog post on it’s own 🙂
Thanks
You are right Michael! Your question is a complete blog post on it’s own :). I will try to write about this sometime! Thanks for your message and welcome to this blog. Congratulations on your first comment!
Hello Ekhlas,
I have been thinking to migrate my site from HTTP to HTTPs, thank you for clearing out my doubts. I want to ask you one question, will migration affect my rankings? I mean, can my rankings fall from search engine for first few days?
Thank You,
Karan
Hello Karan,
Thanks for your question. If you migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPs and you use proper redirection (301) for your existing links then your ranking will be fine. Your old links will pass link credit to new links and thus your new links will be given priority on search engines. However, for first few weeks you might see some down impacts on your search console panel. But as soon as Google crawl your old links and index new links, everything will be fine.
Hope you get your answer. If you need any help from us, please feel free to contact. We can help your SEO campaign.
Hello Ekhlas,
Thank you so much for replying and giving me a straight answer to my query. Yes, I have got the answer now, actually I have done the 301 redirect first for my domain but that was not from http to https, it was from oldsite.com to newsite.com, so I was unsure if same is gonna happen or not. Thanks to you for clearing out my doubts.
Regards,
Karan
Thanks Karan for your reply! I am glad to know, you have found my previous reply helpful. Feel free to visit this blog more often and don’t feel shy to ask me anything!
Please enlighten me on how to move my WP site from http to https. thanks for this wonderful info