How secure is your website? If the answer is that you’re not sure, then you might need to start making some changes to the way you manage your online presence. After all, today’s customers are constantly looking for peace of mind when it comes to shopping online. If you can’t offer your clientele the sense of security that they’re looking for with your shopping pages, lead capture forms, and other important content, then you could quickly lose their attention, and fall behind your competitors.
One of the key things any website must do to ensure it stays ahead of the curve in terms of security, is become as up-to-date as possible with the changes being made by popular search engines like Google. Often, search engines and browsers make updates to their security requirements, to help ensure that they’re giving users the safest online experience they can.
The Latest “Not Secure” Update from Google’s Chrome Browser
The latest update to the Google’s Chrome Browser could make a huge difference to the way that your company is perceived online. In October 2017, the search engine giant will be beginning their quest to improve the strategies that Chrome uses in order to communicate the security of HTTP pages to users. For those who don’t know, HTTP pages are the standard website page.
Chrome will now begin to mark all HTTP pages that include credit card and password fields, such as your checkout page, as “Not Secure” — quite rightly. Beginning during October 2017, Chrome will start to show the “Not Secure” warning to browsers in two different situations: the first being when a user enters data on an HTTP page, and the second being when a user visits any HTTP page in “Incognito mode“.
A Gradual Process for Google
It’s worth noting that the security changes won’t necessarily happen all at once. In fact, Google plans to label HTTP sites as being “Not Secure” through a slow process of various steps, based on broad criteria that may get wider as time progresses.
Since that updates to Chrome 56, the browser company has seen a 23% reduction in a number of navigations that took place towards HTTP pages with credit card forms, and password forms through desktop devices. Today, Google is implementing this new security measure to try and provide their users with the peace of mind that they need to not only access content online but make crucial purchases too.
Notably, Google has outlined that they believe credit cards and passwords aren’t the only types of data that need to remain private. Any kind of data entered into websites by a user should not be accessible to anyone else on the network. This why version 62 of Chrome will begin to show the “Not Secure” warning when users enter their personal data into a form or field that is not protected.
Moving to HTTPS
The only way to maintain the trust of your customers in this age of security updates is to make sure that you provide your users with the level of protection they need. This means moving to the “HTTPS” website certificate. As the eventual treatment of all http pages in chrome will be to mark them very clearly as not secure.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS, is basically just the secure version of an HTTP web page, and it refers to the protocol through which all communications between a user’s browser and a website are encrypted. Since Chrome eventually plans to provide a “Not Secure” warning for all HTTP websites, companies today don’t have any time to waste when it comes to getting their HTTPS certificate. The good news is that switching to encryption for your website is now easier and cheaper than ever before. Just speak to your website host or developer.
