Will Google’s Latest Update Affect Your Website and Business?

This July, Google is updating their Chrome web browser to explicitly notify visitors when they’ve landed on a website that is not secure. It’s likely that other web browsers will follow their lead in order to create a safer environment online.
As the necessity for online security increases, changes like this could have a negative impact on your business if you don’t take action to secure your site.
Not only will customers be less confident about doing business with a website that is not secure, either making purchases or signing up for an email list, but Google is also prioritizing sites encrypting their data to the top of the search engine results page. That means sites that are not secure will show up at the bottom, which could impact the number of site visits coming from search.
Let’s take a look at what should you do to make sure your website traffic is secure and avoid being negatively impacted by Google’s changes.

What Google’s update means for your business

Once Google’s updated web browser Chrome 68 is released in July, users will know whether the site they’re visiting is not encrypting traffic from the ‘Not Secure’ message in the URL, as shown below.

If customers see the ‘Not Secure’ warning, they are more likely to refrain from entering any information on your site, like making a purchase or even signing up for your email list. Another sign is HTTPS at the start of a URL with data encryption, as opposed to HTTP for a not secure website. The URL for websites where traffic is secured with an SSL will look like the URL for bluehost.com shown below.
 
Customers will also be less likely to find your website once Google makes the change to their browser. If your site is still not secure, Google will rank your website lower on the search results page, affecting your traffic and revenue at the same time.

Make your website secure with an SSL Certificate  

An SSL Certificate stands for a Secure Sockets Layer, which by definition, is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. A web server is what a company or business connects with to present their website online, and a web browser is what customers use to connect with web pages on their phones or computers.
To put in simple terms, a web server and web browser work as a team to connect your customer’s computer to your company’s website. An SSL Certificate makes it harder for bad actors to mess with the information that passes between the browser and server. This means your customers can be confident that any personal information they provide is safely delivered and the information they receive from the website is not tampered with.

Why is encryption important?

Without an SSL Certificate encrypting the data passing between your business and your customers, both parties could be at risk. Since smaller companies are unlikely to have a full team working on site security, they are more vulnerable to attacks from bad actors.
A simple SSL Certificate can help to protect your business by:

• Authenticating – Validates that customers are talking to your servers and not someone pretending to be you.
• Retaining data integrity – Keeps bad actors from modifying the communications between your customers computer and your servers, or even injecting unwanted content into blog posts.
• Encrypting data – Keeps the data passing between you and your customers private so the same bad actors can’t develop a profile about you or your customers.
• Boosting SEO rank – Google has started to give a slight boost in the ranking of websites that use an SSL Certificate..

What a simple SSL Certificate doesn’t do:

• Detect and remove malware
• Detect and remove website security vulnerabilities
• Manage search engine ranking & reputation
• Provide a web application firewall
• Protect website against DDos attacks

Encrypt your website traffic now to make the internet a better place  

An encrypted internet is a safer internet, for everyone. This helps keep the internet a place where ideas can flow freely, but it also helps to grow your business, by helping your customers trust you.
In order to help your business and your customers, Bluehost.com is offering free basic SSL to help customers keep their businesses growing. If you’re a Bluehost customer, watch your inbox for more details on how to turn it on for your account. 

Keep your customers and your business safe and secure

It’s nice to know the businesses you are talking with online are the real deal and not an impersonation. It helps to have some reassurance in place to know you’re safe. An SSL Certificate helps to keep the data passing between your customers and your business safe, and after Google releases Chrome 68 in July, an encrypted site will become even more important.  
Make sure your customers can trust your business, can sign up for your email list, and can shop online with confidence. It also serves as a sign that your business cares about security, and cares about customers.