One of our top quick website improvement tips is to make your website secure with HTTPS, which is a secure version of the Http web protocol.
HTTPS encrypts the data for your website visitors for a more secure browsing experience, making sure web traffic can't be intercepted as it travels back and forth between the user's computer and your hosting provider. This is an obvious benefit to your site visitors.
Additionally, since October 2017 Google warns Chrome site users who navigate to non-HTTPS sites that the page is not secure. This message may scare some site visitors away.
HTTPS also has SEO benefits because Google prefers HTTPS sites over HTTP sites. Google incorporated HTTPS into its page ranking algorithms in order to give preference to secure sites. Thus, with HTTPS your site is more likely to appear higher in Google searches. A secure site also helps with local SEO for the same reasons.
Finally, an important benefit to HTTPS is that it allows for more precise referral information in Google Analytics. While with HTTP many site referrals may appear incorrectly as direct traffic, with HTTPS the referrals are reported correctly.
It's important to note that moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS requires careful redirection settings that may vary slightly depending on your domain and hosting settings. This is to make sure your old accumulated "SEO juice" is retained, and links pointing to your site from various sources continue working correctly. One should also make sure third-party services are aware of the change, most notably the Google Search Console, which considers HTTP and HTTPS sites to be separate entities.
Need Help Securing Your Website?
Asymmetric, led by former Army Delta Force operator and corporate executive, Mark Hope, can help you implement these ideas in your business. You can contact Mark by email at mark.hope@asymmetric.pro, or by telephone at +1 866-389-4746, or you can schedule a complimentary strategy discussion by clicking here. You can read all of his articles on Medium.
Mark Hope
Mark A. Hope is the founder and CEO of Asymmetric Marketing – a unique agency specializing in building high-performing sales and marketing systems, campaigns, processes, and strategies for small businesses. Asymmetric has extensive experience with organizations across many industry segments. If you would like some help in implementing ideas like these in this article, feel free to give Mark a call at 844-494-6903 or by email at mark.hope@asymmetric.pro.