The pace of change on the web never lets up, and website features which start out as merely desirable, soon go on to become essential. Just think of responsive design – relatively recently it was ok to have a site which didn’t adapt to mobile screens, but that certainly isn’t acceptable now.
The switch to responsive layouts was partly driven by Google, who are also behind the latest change that website owners should be aware of, which is to do with security. Until recently, only e-commerce sites, or those storing sensitive information, needed to be encrypted. This encryption process is carried out by installing something called an SSL certificate, and sites which have one can be recognised by the fact that their domain name starts with the letters https, instead of http.
This wasn’t a major issue, until Google began to use its Chrome browser (the most popular browser on the web) to flag up http sites as not secure:
Will this warning scare off your clients? At the moment, it is reasonably discreet, so you might not be losing business just yet, but Google plans to make it much more explicit, in order to drive everyone to improve web security. The upshot? In 2017, we reached a tipping point on this issue, so if you don’t already have an SSL, you should definitely consider acquiring one in 2018, even if your site doesn’t take payments or store customers’ data.
For more help and advice on this, please get in touch.