Is your website secured with an SSL certificate?

You may have heard starting this month Google Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as ‘not secure’.

This has been in the pipeline a while now with many sites being displayed as insecure(including Arbtalk until quite recently)

Previously you may have noticed a small exclamation mark in your browser window, however with the new changes your site will be marked clearly as ‘not secure’.

This is the most forceful nudge yet from Google, designed to make more sites adopt HTTPS status thus making the web a more secure environment.

So what does this mean to your website visitors?

Well basically not much in terms of safety, at least for the majority of tree surgery websites who aren’t collecting or processing data such as credit card numbers.  However even a basic contact form sends data, so to comply with googles recommendations all this information should be encrypted.

Of more concern though is your visitors reaction to the warning.  In this day and age more and more people are concerned and aware of the importance of security when surfing the internet.  For some who aren’t aware exactly what this ‘not secure’ warning means it is likely have a vast impact on the duration of time a user spends on your site, perhaps even causing a large percentage of visitors to navigate away from your site immediately.

You can test if your site complies by simply looking at the navigation bar in google chrome for the green secure tag.

Free SSL Certificates with Arbtalk Hosting

Many hosting companies charge for SSL certificates, some as much as £80 plus set up fees which is renewable every 12 months

If you host your business website with Arbtalk we supply SSL certificates for free with no yearly  renewals.  Just a one time set up fee of £20 + vat is all it takes to make your site compliant.  With hosting costing only £60 +vat per year with Arbtalk this makes for a cost effective and reliable solution

If you’re concerned your site doesn’t have HTTPS status you can contact me either through the Arbtalk pm system or via email [email protected]