How To Secure Your Website With HTTPS
Securing your website with HTTPS is crucial if you want your website to rank properly in Google. Without this, personal information of your users will be accessible to unauthorized third parties.
In this article, we’ll cover what HTTPS is, why it matters, what the difference is with HTTP, and how to secure your website with HTTPS.
I’d recommend checking out the full technical SEO guide to ensure all the “behind-the-scenes” elements are working perfectly.
What Is HTTPS?
HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, is the secure, encrypted version of HTTP that protects data exchanged between your browser and a website from being read or modified by authorized parties.
HTTPS wraps everything in encryption, so no one can casually snoop on a network and read what you send or receive. This way, your password, email address, card number, etc., are protected. Only the website with the correct key can read the encrypted data. Browsers show a secure lock next to the URL to signal that the website is secure.
HTTPS relies on a security protocol called TLS. TLS uses a pair of keys, one public and one private, to handle the encryption and decryption in the background while you browse online. You never see these keys directly. A digital certificate, given by a trusted authority, proves that the site you’re visiting is the genuine owner of those keys.
Why HTTPS Is Important For SEO Performance
Search engines see HTTPS as a signal of trust. This has a direct impact on how visible your website becomes and your SEO performance. If you still have HTTP, the browser will show a “Not Secure” warning, which scares visitors away. This sends a negative signal to search engines, which will decrease your rankings.
You also protect the integrity of your content, which search engines care about. HTTPS ensures that what you publish is exactly what users see. This consistency supports your credibility and improves how search engine algorithms evaluate your website.
The Difference Between HTTPS & HTTP
HTTPS ensures your personal information can’t be seen by unauthorized parties, because the data is encrypted. So, your password, credit card number, email address, etc., are just meaningless gibberish instead of readable information. Without the private key, they can’t decode it. With HTTP, other parties could read your personal information without too much effort.
There is also a difference in trust. HTTP does nothing to prove that you are the owner of the domain. HTTPS uses digital certificates to authenticate that the website is who it claims to be.
How To Secure Your Website With HTTPS (With Hosting Platform)
If you work with a hosting platform, it’s about clicking the right buttons. I use Hostinger, but most of the time it’s roughly the same process across various hosting platforms.
When you log into your hosting dashboard, look for something like SSL, Security, or HTTPS settings.
Your host often offers a free SSL certificate. You can simply activate this if it hasn’t been activated already. For my website, it was already activated from the start, but you can install it by clicking on the three dots icon.
If you install 301 redirections, you sometimes have to add HTTP or HTTPS manually. If you use the Rank Math SEO plugin to install redirections HTTPS is added automatically if you activated it via your host.
If you install redirection via your host, you probably have to add HTTPS manually. In your host dashboard, go to “Redirects.” When your website wasn’t secure, so with HTTP and change it to HTTPS, you need to redirect all the HTTP URLs to the new HTTPS URLs.
Here, you can manually set it to HTTPS and complete the redirection.
