You are already aware of the risk posed by cybercriminals in the online world, aren’t you? Online wizards would tell you to protect your website with HTTPS. But what is HTTPS and how does it safeguard your website? Spelled as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure, HTTPS is a protocol designed to secure communication or exchange of information between the server and the browser. Let’s dig deeper into it to understand why HTTPS is important and how HTTPS works.
What is HTTPS
HTTPS adds a layer of security during the transit of data from the remote user to the web server and vice versa. Compared to HTTP, HTTPS uses the Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption to encrypt every data packet to establish a secure connection during the exchange of information. Encrypted data is difficult to breach. As such, since the message is encrypted, intermediary hackers cannot intercept the content of the data in the event the security is compromised.
Most browsers support and configure HTTPS by default. As such, a secure connection is automatically established, preventing hackers from accessing or modifying the information during transit. The two computers agree on a secret code to decipher the messages in random character strings, ensuring nobody can read them and data remains safe from hackers.
How HTTP Works?
Initially, network administrators came up with HTTP to exchange information on the Internet. However, the data was not safe and could be easily intercepted. To prevent the information from falling into wrong hands, HTTPS was agreed upon to encrypt the data.
- Secure Communication
HTTPS establishes an encrypted link to secure data exchange between two systems. So this gives you a reason to switch from HTTP to HTTPS.
- Privacy and Security
Websites with HTTPS are secured with SSL encryption that protects the privacy and security of users. The computer owner’s public key is hidden in the SSL certificates, which is not shared publicly. Encrypted data is not easy to intercept, thus acting as a safeguard from hacking attempts.
- Data Integrity
In the event of a hacking attempt, the web data on an HTTPS website is less likely to be breached, as HTTPS provides data integrity by encrypting the information. This means that criminals cannot do anything with the coded data.
- Better Performance & Speed
Websites with HTTPS perform better than HTTP sites, as the former encrypts and reduces the data size, thus increasing the speed of data exchange. The new HTTP/2 features improve compression and pipelining to make web pages load faster.
- SEO
Websites with HTTPS enjoy higher SEO ranking than those with HTTP. Besides, when a user visits a site with HTTP, the browser shows Not Secure label. This could create doubt in the mind of website visitors regarding the safety of their information on an “unsecure” site.
Bottom Line
It is important to protect your websites with HTTPS, irrespective of the information hosted by them. Besides ensuring critical security and data integrity for the website and its users, HTTPS confirms visitors that they are visiting a secure site with an encrypted certificate issued by a legitimate authority. Google has set its search engine to a default HTTPS connection, which means nobody can see what you’re browsing on Google.com. On top of it, Google is getting strict with HTTP connections by penalizing and flagging websites as unsafe in Chrome. In doing so, the largest search engine seems to favor and prioritize websites with HTTPS. This is surely a strong incentive to switch from HTTP to HTTPS.
But the story was different sometime back until HTTPS was introduced, when your Internet service provider and any person using the same Wi-Fi network could see your searches. They could exploit your critical information and even sell the same to advertisers. HTTPS is like an umbrella of security under which you would want to cover your website. So you have more reasons than one to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS from the unsafe HTTP.
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