If you have been on the fence for any length of time concerning whether to purchase an SSL certificate for your website and enable HTTPS for all your web pages, now is the time! As we've documented in a previous post, web browsers have been "strongly advocating that sites adopt HTTPS encryption" over the last year through new features and notifications. However, the strongest push toward a more secure web is coming next month.

Over the last several months, as new versions of Chrome, FireFox, and Internet Explorer have been released, we have experienced a much higher report of “connection is not secure” messages, especially for sites that collect sensitive or private information. These can be as unassuming as a red unlocked icon near the URL, or as intrusive as a pop-up message indicating pure doom if a viewer continues to the website in question.

Has something changed on the site? No. What has changed is the engineered deprecation of non secure sites on the internet, meaning that your web browser is now reporting sites to you that are not using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), indicated by “https” at the beginning of the URL rather than “http”.