Protect your site and your users by being sure that your website is secure by looking for the https in the beginning of your URL (website address). If http is showing and not https, your website be pushed "down" in the search rankings and any information that is submitted to your site is in jeopardy of being stolen by hackers, like our friend below.
What is HTTPS? HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user's computer and the site. Users expect a secure and private online experience when using a website. We encourage you to adopt HTTPS in order to protect your users' connections to your website, regardless of the content on the site. Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:
Encryption—encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can "listen" to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages, or steal their information.
Data integrity—data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
Authentication—proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.
Best practices when implementing HTTPS Use robust security certificates! You must obtain a security certificate as a part of enabling HTTPS for your site. The certificate is issued by a certificate authority (CA), which takes steps to verify that your web address actually belongs to your organization, thus protecting your customers from man-in-the-middle attacks. When setting up your certificate, ensure a high level of security by choosing a 2048-bit key. If you already have a certificate with a weaker key (1024-bit), upgrade it to 2048 bits. When choosing your site certificate, keep in mind the following:
Get your certificate from a reliable CA that offers technical support.
Decide the kind of certificate you need:
Single certificate for single secure origin (e.g. www.example.com).
Multi-domain certificate for multiple well-known secure origins (e.g. www.example.com, cdn.example.com, example.co.uk).
Wildcard certificate for a secure origin with many dynamic subdomains (e.g. a.example.com, b.example.com).
Use server-side 301 redirects Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects. Verify that your HTTPS pages can be crawled and indexed by Google
Do not block your HTTPS pages by robots.txt files.
Do not include meta noindex tags in your HTTPS pages.
Use the URL Inspection tool to test whether Googlebot can access your pages.