Earlier this month, Google announced July 2018 as the release date for Chrome 68. Included with this new version of Chrome is a new push for web developers to convert from HTTP to HTTPS, and prominent warnings for websites that don’t make the move. The change will affect more than 50 percent of Internet browsers worldwide.
The new warnings will be shown in Chrome’s address bar and may cause users to leave your site. This is especially important for e-commerce sites that might lose customers. This kind of negative activity can also affect a site’s bounce rate and advertising.
In an effort to push more web publishers into upgrading to HTTPS, Google was clear about their intent.
“Chrome’s new interface will help users understand that all HTTP sites are not secure, and continue to move the web towards a secure HTTPS web by default. HTTPS is easier and cheaper than ever before, and it unlocks both performance improvements and powerful new features that are too sensitive for HTTP.”
Why is HTTPS important? Not only does it protect sensitive information, it also prevents intruders from monitoring your site’s behavior, in an effort to understand and identify your users. Malicious intruders can also exploit communications to install malware or to inject advertisements. Intrusions can happen anywhere, on any kind of hardware.
If you haven’t moved your website to HTTPS, we strongly suggest you do so now. The migration is a fairly time consuming process that requires securing each and every unprotected resource on your site. Images, cookies, HTML are all vulnerable to attack. They must be secured individually. Therefore we suggest making the move immediately, to insure you meet the July deadline.
Here’s more about the move to HTTPS from Google engineer Adrienne Porter Felt.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-on-https-migration/236837/