Google have announced that by the end of this month (January 2017) they will display in the address bar of their Chrome browser if a site is insecure. At the moment they just have an information symbol (‘i’ in a circle) but that will have ‘Not secure’ added to it.
So, what does that mean? Whenever you view a website it’s content is transferred from the server to your browser. This can be intercepted during that transfer. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is where the data is encrypted when it leaves the server and decrypted again by the browser just before displaying it. If anyone tries to intercept it along its journey they won’t see anything meaningful.
Banks have been using this for many years but it was always something regular sites didn’t need. Also, in the past it was accepted that the process of encrypting and decrypting would make the site slower.
Now Google is driving forward the desire for all sites to use this method. The good news is it’s nowhere near as costly as it used to be.
If you have your site hosted with us, get in touch to discuss having SSL installed so you won’t be affected by this change.