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 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.
That's why it's important to keep all website security constantly up to date. This can be quite a hassle, especially when HTTPS redirects break due to missing or expired certificates. 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. For a hands-on walkthrough, see our guide on how to redirect with HTTPS.
How does website encryption work?
On the internet, data is constantly moved between locations. When you open a website, data is moved from a remote server to your browser. This makes it vulnerable to interception by third parties. Personal information such as credit card details and online banking passwords can be accessed by 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'll 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 SSL encryption, third parties can still intercept data, but without the correct encryption key, any intercepted data will come across as nonsensical characters.
- TLS, which stands for Transport Layer Security, is an updated version of SSL with all known vulnerabilities fixed. Although TLS is now more commonly used, security certificates are still referred to as SSL certificates.
SSL and TLS certificates are used to establish this encrypted connection. They provide the mechanism for encryption and the authentication that ensures users are connecting to a safe website.
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. 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 sent over regular HTTP is broken into packets of plain text. This data can be intercepted and read by anyone with access to the network. HTTPS encrypts this data so that intercepted packets come across as nonsensical characters.
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 protected. SSL also protects usernames, passwords, documents, images, and other personal information. Even pages meant only for reading need website security to keep user activity private. For a broader overview of redirect types including HTTPS, see our complete guide to URL redirects.
Why HTTPS affects SEO
HTTPS is not only important for the safety of your visitors, it can also improve your SEO authority. 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 warnings for websites lacking SSL certificates, flagging them as "not secure."
If you transition from HTTPS to HTTP, this can also affect your data analytics when using services like Google Analytics. Referral data from non-secured websites is not passed from HTTPS to HTTP pages. All your referral traffic will show as direct in the analytics software, meaning you'll end up with skewed data and miss your best referral sources.
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. When the SSL certificate on the old website expires, visitors hit SSL errors before the redirect even happens. SSL certificates need to be updated frequently, and doing this manually across dozens of domains is a burden. That's where redirect.pizza comes in with automatic HTTPS.
HTTPS everywhere with redirect.pizza
With redirect.pizza, you'll be able to add redirects in minutes while making sure the security of all your old domains stays up to date.
We automatically ensure that there is an SSL certificate active for all your domains and renew them before they expire. All SSL certificates carry an A+ SSL Labs rating. Your security is handled without any effort from your side.
