Chrome now marking all HTTP sites as insecure

A timely reminder from Let’s Encrypt this week as the world’s most popular web browser is now warning users about all none HTTPS sites:

Happy Chrome 68 day! HTTP sites will now be marked as "not secure" in Chrome. We applaud the @googlechrome team as they make the Web more secure in a big way with this release.

— Let's Encrypt (@letsencrypt) July 24, 2018

July 24th saw Chrome make the long awaited move that’s been slowly coming for a couple of years now. From July 25th onwards, if your site has a form on it and isn’t on HTTPS, Chrome will alert the user to your site being insecure. To put this into perspective, some sites put the total usage stats of Chrome as high as 80% of the browser market! Even conservative reports rate Chrome usage as more than 60%. That means if you haven’t yet updated to SSL on your site, at least six out of ten users of your site are receiving an error message the moment they load it up:

With today’s increased focus on security and web safety, this almost certainly means a portion of your site’s potential users and traffic are simply quitting your site in favour of an error free (SSL enabled) competitor. We’ve been writing about this day for a couple of years now, with increasing severity:

https://www.34sp.com/blog/ssl-matters-ever-2018/
https://www.34sp.com/blog/lets-encrypt-one-year-later/
https://www.34sp.com/blog/end-line-non-ssl-sites/
https://www.34sp.com/blog/ssl-easier-simpler-cheaper-2017/
https://www.34sp.com/blog/lets-encrypt-free-ssl-certificates/

The simple fact is websites that are not SSL enabled will start to see a marked decline in traffic and usage. Expect to see this accelerate from this point as well. There’s no reason not to make the move: SSL is free on all 34SP.com hosted sites.

If you’ve still not made the jump, check out our guide here:

https://www.34sp.com/kb/141/how-to-install-a-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificate

or drop a line to our support team (support@34sp.com) so we can advise on moving your site to https ASAP!