We've known for a while now that one of the many criteria that Google uses to rank your website is whether or not it is served via https.
In other words whether your site is encrypted and has a security certificate.
Every ecommerce site we build, always has a security certificate that's used when a customer enters their personal details or credit card (this is a requirement to accept credit cards online). However up until recently we've not encrypted the rest of the website, mainly because older security settings cause the sites to work slightly slower. And that's not a great outcome for any website let alone a sales based website.
All sites now moving towards full HTTPS
With new technology, websites using an SSL Certificate to encrypt all their pages have had a negligible speed impact, which means it's now the right time to encrypt the entire websites. And as can be seen from the chart (from Google) the amount of sites that now exclusively use https has skyrocketed.
All new ecommerce websites will use full https
This means that we now will be launching all new ecommerce websites to always use the SSL certificate.
Existing clients and SSL
For our existing clients, some work is required to enable the SSL for the entire website. In addition to adding the required code to the website and testing the site continues operating, the following items should be done:
- Create a new Google Webmaster Console Account for the https version & verify
- Update any links in advertising to the new https version
- Resubmit sitemaps to google
- Update any third party content to use https
For WordPress Blog Users
If your site has a blog, the software for the blog will also have to be updated and some work done. We will progressively over the next 4 - 6 weeks enable the full https of your ecommerce website and will email as it occurs. If you would like your site done sooner you can contact us to accelerate the process. If you would also like us to manage the process of updating the google console we can do this as well please contact us.