HTTPS vs HTTP

[emmabjones]

What are the pros and cons of having the HTTPS certificate? If you have an "old" website with hundreds of blog posts and pages that is using HTTP, is it a good idea to buy and set up an SSL certificate and is it difficult to do it?

 

[jacobc]

Hi,

Pros

• It will give your customers more confidence
• It will encrypt the data to and from your site to the users computer, protecting their data.
• It will improve your SEO as Google prefers secure sites

Cons

• It may make your site slightly slower.
• There is a cost associated to it.

It is simple for your hosting provider to do. It won't make any difference if the site is old or new.

Hope that helps.

Jacob

 

[andygambles]

As long as you ensure you correctly 301 all content to HTTPS then it will have little affect on your listing better or worse. HTTPS is used as a ranking factor but currently provides very little additional weighting. (If two sites were exactly the same in all other areas for ranking and one was HTTPS then it would be higher).

What it does provide is security that your visitor is viewing your site and with some an additional validation of who you are.

 

[cormac reynolds]

As stated above HTTPS provides security.

Currently it's a very marginal factor towards ranking. Simply put if there were two hypothetical sites, where every other ranking factor was the same looking at being ranked for a position, where one was HTTP and one HTTPS - it's likely the latter would be chosen.

One thing to also note, is it may become more of a ranking factor in the future.

 

[emmabjones]

I've read an article by the SEO guru Brian Dean where he suggests it's not a good idea to add the certificate to an existing website because it's a risky process and link juice will be lost when using the 301 redirect which will lead to lower rankings in the short run. That's why I'm still not sure what to do with my website...

 

[cormac reynolds]

I've heard that before too from Brian Dean. But I'm not sure how true it is.

I guess it's a case of risk and reward - do you think the risk of this happening is worth the trust your customers would have in your site if you get a https cert.

 

[emmabjones]

do you think the risk of this happening is worth the trust your customers would have in your site if you get a https cert.

Honestly, I think our clients don't care about the certificate and don't know anything about HTTPS.

 

[CarlReed]

IMO it's only worth it if you're in a big niche where all your comp use https, otherwise it's not really going to show you an ROI because for a decent cert it's pretty expensive

 

[emmabjones]

Is it risky to buy less expensive certificate?

 

[Kevin Mitnick]

Is it risky to buy less expensive certificate?

There is no risk of buying Cheap or less expensive SSL Certificates, each SSL certificate will offer up to 256-bit encryption length and strength which is almost impossible to crack.

The use of SSL certificate is depends on the requirement of user and its website type, if you carry small website which collects less number of user information then a low price Domain Validated SSL Certificate will suits best.

If you carry online business which ask user's financial information for transaction then Organization validated or Extended validated SSL certificate are recommended.

 

[pilgrim.marketing]

Is it risky to buy less expensive certificate?

It's like buying Nurofen instead of Morrison's own Ibuprofen. They'll tell you they're better, but really it's just the name. Nowadays especially since there are many more authorities than their used to be.

 

[StevePoster]

Not all websites need HTTPS certificate and it will depend on what type of online business like financial transaction which requires privacy and security.

 

[MaureenP]

Is it risky to buy less expensive certificate?

There is no risk to buy less expensive ssl certificate because its price is varies from one vendor to another. Before going to buy any ssl certificate just see, is that particular certificate from trusted authorities such as Symantec, RapidSSL, Thawte, Geotrust or not. There are other certificate authorities too but these are most popular in the ssl industry.

 

[mzone]

If you run an Online Shop, Online Data Base, etc then I would you recommend to buy one of SSL certificate (even cheapest one Comodo). For own blog use or basic website you don't need it.

 

[david64]

My question is: How much attention do people pay to their address bar and how many know what its accouterments mean? I've been working online for 10 years and I only discovered the difference between SSL certs. late last year when I began vaguely looking for an SSL cert. I'd previously noted that some sites had a big chunky green block with the company name, compared to the diddling padlock that most sites use. And I was impressed; and it did increase my trust in the website. But what does the average person think when they see that?

It's quite obvious that many people have no idea about SSL, password security and so on. I was quite surprised to find out that UKBF does not use HTTPS for logins and has no SSL at all. That means, I would assume 100K plus people have registered on a site and sent their password whizzing through 10-30 computers; and many sign-in a day under the same conditions. I expected better from such a large forum. But this goes to show that most people don't have a clue when it comes to SSL.

Some interesting details here though:

https://www.papercheck.com/extended-validation-helps-boost-conversion-at-papercheck/

You can get EV for about £100/year. So, IMO in consideration of my own experience, the above article, it is worth most ecom sites that do decent business getting one. I was considering getting one for my affiliate site (Alexa 20K) when I get round to it. Just for the boost it will give in terms of 'branding'; and there is a good chance it could pass a few more conversions though. In my case it would take about one more conversion a month to pay for the cert. It seems a good idea for something to at least try for a year.

As for the ultra-expensive cert.s, I don't know whether they can be justified for SMEs over standard EV?

 

[Jainbandhu]

nice and i agree with it

 

[rf-harris]

If you are gonna move from http to https then there is not much to worry about. You should go ahead and move to https as there is hardly anything to lose at least in my opinion.

 

[ronnie7272]

There is no need to spend money on a SSL certificate.

Use https://letsencrypt.org/.

If your site is hosted on a cPanel server the Let's Encrypt plugin might already be installed which makes it a one click process.

As far as SEO is concerned there are no negative reasons not to do it. Just make sure you have the redirect set up. Regardless of SEO, every website should use SSL as standard practice especially when it's free.

 

[Thomas Harvey]

I know this was a gravedig by @Tabslogic however I do want to add to the conversation. There's now even more of a reason to go to https.

1. Speed, if you use http/2 then you will actually see an increase in the speed of your site in the majority of cases. There will be exceptions (small sites requested small amounts of files - 20 requests per page). This can easily be done through Cloudflare.

2. Rankings, there's the obvious beings https is a ranking signal (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html) There's now no loss of pagerank for http -> https (https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PY1xCWbeDVC)

# Do I lose "link juice" from the redirects? No, for 301 or 302 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS no PageRank is lost.

3. Free SSL - Cloudflare and Lets Encrypt make it really easy to have a site running https without spending money.

 

[VBerardi]

As people have said it is marginal. However, if you ever plan to take payments you will need it if you want to take payments on your site (i.e. stripe) instead of redirecting to paypal.

If you never plan to have payment processing I am not sure it is worth it.

 

[Xtm_Mike]

As people have said it is marginal. However, if you ever plan to take payments you will need it if you want to take payments on your site (i.e. stripe) instead of redirecting to paypal.

If you never plan to have payment processing I am not sure it is worth it.

We're at a stage now it's never not worth it, it's almost effortless to do and there a no negatives... with LetsEncrypt and now cPanel hosting providers can you give free 90day auto renewing SSL certificates with AutoSSL.

We issue free SSL certificates with every hosting account.