Are You Switching Back Your Website to HTTP from HTTPS?
Do you remember the hype a few months back when all the webmasters started converting their website to HTTPS? Now so many website owners are converting back to the http one. Are you too switching back your website to HTTP from HTTPS?
I guess it was in the month of August last year when I wrote a post on Google emphasizing on secure websites, and we discussed about the ranking signals which Google is focused and HTTPS being considered by Google as a ranking signal. Though it was the time when everyone else started upgrading their website to a secure server.
Although that time too I suggested not to hurry about these things, rather it would be fine to wait and watch for some time, but you know the fact that when people consider something is going to give good results especially in Google ranking, we all started to follow the same things.
Honestly I did realize that it was not something which should force us to upgrade our server and install SSL for our website. Frankly, we know that it is a costly affair and not many websites or blogs which are earning very less can afford it.
And to be very frank, the latest trend in the world of SEO is that since not many people saw any considerable changes in their rankings, many webmasters, and SEO’s are reverting back their website to HTTP from the secure HTTPS.
Let me tell you a few instances when you really don’t need a HTTPS or SSL certification on your website:
If your website is fully informational site, or a blog, then I don’t think that your website does need any kind of HTTPS thing. Since none of financial transactions are happening on your website so what is the need to have SSL certificate on it?
If your website is not storing any sensitive data of users, then obviously you don’t need HTTPS on your website. As for an example, some websites do store the credit card details of its users, for them HTTPS or SSL certification is a must.
Those who switched their website to HTTPS from HTTP can only emphasize on the fact over what benefits they do received after doing this. How much is the ranking improved due to it? How much is the authority of your website increased due to it?
If you too followed the trends and upgrade your website from HTTP to HTTPS, then I would request you to please share your opinion and results with us. Those who did the same, are having a feeling that if they made some mistakes? I would be glad to hear their opinion on all these things along with the fact if you are also considering reverting back to the HTTP module?
Very Nice and informative post Alok Sir 🙂
Thanks for sharing this wonderful update.
Thank you so much Gaurav 🙂
Informative article. Do you think even for landing page perspective it should be changed to https? After all, financial transaction is done on payment page, then how useful it is to change landing page urls to secure connection from simple http?
Well Vishal as far as my personal opinion is concerned, I guess only the pages in which we are going to collect some important data should be converted into HTTPS, but as far as general opinion is concerned, if your website is meant for doing some online business then I guess it should be https only. But yes practically speaking all those pages, be it landing one or websites, should remain in http mode only if it is not passing any financial or important data.
Thanks Alok, this was a very helpful post.. Looks like I am sticking with http 🙂
🙂 Thank you so much buddy.
Well, there has been an SSL 2.0 venerability discovered too by Google, which forced people to rethink and enable SSL 3.0 or completely change their HTTPS/SSL certificates.
I fully endorse you views that unless there is sensitive data flowing (like financial transactions), there is no point having an HTTPS certificate for your site. HTTPS was never meant for SEO purposes technically, but probably Google started giving importance to them due to the “trust factor”. I do use SSL for some of the sites I support, but they are more of e-commerce sites, but for my own blog and travelogue, it has always been simple HTTP! 🙂
Absolutely correct 🙂 Thank you so much sir 🙂