Encrypt and secure your website with HTTPS

Safety always comes first. So if you want to make sure that all your visitors can safely visit your website, you’ll definitely need to encrypt the data transmitted to and from your website. The encryption of your data is critical for protecting your user’s privacy and for having a secure presence all around the internet. It used to be something optional, but these days data encryption has turned into a necessity. Hackers roaming the internet continue to seek ways to steal information sent between users and web services.

That’s why it’s important to keep all website security constantly up to date. This can be quite a hassle. But no worries, redirect.pizza can jump in and help.

Find out more about how website encryption works, why it’s so important, and what redirect.pizza can do for you.

How does website encryption work?

On the internet, data is constantly moved between locations. When you open a website, for instance, data is moved from a remote server to your browser. This moving around makes it highly vulnerable to interception by third parties. Personal information such as credit card information and online banking passwords are basically up for grabs for anyone with access to the network.

Unless… you encrypt all data moving from and to your website. So how does this work? Let’s start with the basics.

What is HTTPS, SSL, and TLS?

When you’d like to know more about encrypting your website, the terms HTTPS, SSL, and TLS are something you’d want to get familiar with. So what do they mean?

• HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, is an extended version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It secures and encrypts the data transferred from and to a website by using SSL or TLS.
• SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, is a protocol that provides security by encrypting data sent between browsers, websites, and servers. With the security of SSL, hackers will get no chance to see or steal any information that is transferred. All the personal and financial data of your visitors will be safe. With SSL, third parties can still intercept encrypted data, but thanks to the encryption it becomes nearly impossible to decipher it. Without the correct encryption key, any intercepted data will all come across as nonsensical characters.
• TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security, is an updated version of SSL and is even more secure. With TLS, all known SSL vulnerabilities are fixed.

SSL and TLS certificates are used to establish this encrypted connection. SSL and TLS provide the mechanism for the encryption, while the certificates provide the authentication, ensuring users are connecting to a safe website. Although TLS is now more commonly used, security certificates are still referred to as SSL certificates, since this is a more common term.

How to know if a website is encrypted

To check if a website is encrypted, look for the padlock icon in the address bar of your browser, or check the URL. The start of an encrypted URL includes the prefix “https”.

Clicking on the padlock icon can also lead to more details about the level of security. It can tell you more about the type of encryption used, the issuing authority, the corporate name of the website owner, the identity of the website, and the validity of the SSL certificate. However, keep in mind that this doesn’t completely ensure that the website content is trustworthy. It only tells you that the data sent between user and website is encrypted.

Why is it important to encrypt your website?

With HTTPS you can make sure that your website is not broadcasting information in a way that makes it easily accessible by third parties. Data that is sent over regular HTTP is broken into packets of information that occur in plain text. This type of data can be easily intercepted and accessed by anyone with access to the network. HTTPS encrypts this data so that in the case of interception, the packets of information will come across as nonsensical characters. It won't be readable for anyone who tries to snoop around in your private information.

With a secure website, you encrypt all types of information transferred to and from your website. This includes data from checkout pages, login panels, blogs, and informational sites. When checkout pages are secured, customers are more likely to complete a purchase. Because they can be assured that their credit card info is in safe hands. SSL also protects usernames and passwords and documents, images, or other personal information that is submitted. Even pages that are just meant for reading, such as blogs or informational sites, need website security to keep user activity private.

Why using HTTPS / Website encryption affects SEO

HTTPS is not only important for the safety of your visitors, it can also improve your SEO authority, also known as page rank. In 2014 Google announced that it was going to reward SSL-secured websites with a higher ranking. And although it counts as a lightweight factor, it’s still a factor. In 2018 Google added ‘punishments’ for websites lacking SSL certificates, by flagging them as not secure.

If you’d transition from HTTPS to HTTP, this can also affect your data analytics when using services like Google Analytics. This is because referral data from non-secured websites is not passed from HTTPS to HTTP pages. All your referral traffic will be linked as direct in the analytics software. This means you’ll end up with skewed data, and you’re unable to see your best referral sources. You’ll be missing out on great link-building opportunities.

Redirecting and HTTPS for your website

With HTTPS, there is another thing to consider when you switch from one domain to another. To preserve your SEO authority from your old domain and prevent broken links, you’ll want to redirect your old URLs to your new ones. But simply setting up redirects without considering SSL can get you in trouble. A problem with your redirects will occur when the SSL certificate on the old website expires. Suddenly, SSL errors will come up. So SSL certificates need to be updated frequently, but doing this manually would be quite a hassle. That’s where redirect.pizza can help! One of our key features is automatic HTTPS.

HTTPS everywhere with redirect.pizza

redirect.pizza can make your life a lot easier. With redirect.pizza, you’ll be able to add redirects in no time, while making sure the security of all your old domains is up to date.

We automatically ensure that there is an SSL certificate active for all your domains. We’ll also automatically renew them. And all SSL certificates have A+ SSL Laps rating. With redirect.pizza, your security is safely looked after without any effort from your side.