Show your website security on Google Chrome | Website advice with Inspire IT Services

Update On SSL Certificates & How They Are Displayed On Google Chrome

Have you noticed any changes in the navigation bar when you are using Google Chrome?  Until the end of last year, if you had a valid SSL certificate* this was signified to site visitors by a padlock and https before your domain name.  It meant that visitors to your site could see it was safe to leave their details with you when prompted.

But now Google Chrome displays a big fat green Secure as well as the padlock and the https.   

But why is this important?  If you are NOT an online merchant you might wonder what all the fuss is about.  Cyber Crime in 2016 in England and Wales alone topped 3.6 million cases.  It’s only going to get worse.  The big internet players all display the bold “Secure” word now giving assurance to their site visitors and customers that leaving their data is safe.  Shouldn’t you be doing the same?  Would your site visitors be more comfortable leaving their data on a safe site?

Google really are pushing ahead with the move to more security because yet another change rolls out on Tuesday 31 January when pages that have credit card entry fields and forms on sites that don’t have an SSL Certificate will look like this:

It’s not a good message to be giving out to your site visitors that you do not value their data enough to hold it securely.

If your website does NOT have any pages that collect data of any description, then this issue is not so pressing.  If your website does have this sort of page, do make sure it is made secure – speak to your web designer today!

Longer term, we would recommend that all website owners carefully consider locking down their website security.  Google have long signposted their intentions to keep moving forward with Internet Security so don’t be surprised if in the not so distant future that non secure websites are penalised in search rankings.

*SSL Certificates are small data files that digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. When installed on a web server, it activates the padlock and the https protocol and allows secure connections from a web server to a browser. Typically, SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins, and more recently is becoming the norm when securing browsing of social media sites.