Https Vs Http Difference
What Are the Differences Between HTTP & HTTPS? | Venafi
What Are the Differences Between HTTP and HTTPS?
December 10, 2020
Guest Blogger: Anastasios Arampatzis
Venafi is a strong proponent of and is always encouraging people to move to HTTPS for several reasons such as performance benefits, security, and even SEO advantages. While we constantly use the acronyms HTTP and HTTPS, it is equally important to understand the basics of how they work and what their differences are.
In a Nutshell
HTTPS is HTTP with encryption. The difference between the two protocols is that HTTPS uses TLS (SSL) to encrypt normal HTTP requests and responses. As a result, HTTPS is far more secure than HTTP. A website that uses HTTP has HTTP in its URL, while a website that uses HTTPS has HTTPS.
Figure 1: HTTP vs HTTPS. Image source: Cloudflare
What is HTTP?
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and it is a protocol—or a prescribed order and syntax for presenting information—used for transferring data over a network. Most information that is sent over the Internet, including website content and API calls, uses the HTTP protocol.
There are two main kinds of HTTP messages: requests and responses. HTTP requests are generated by a user’s browser as the user interacts with web properties. For example, if a user clicks on a hyperlink, the browser will send a series of “HTTP GET” requests for the content that appears on that page. These HTTP requests go to either an origin server or a proxy caching server, and that server will generate an HTTP response. HTTP responses are answers to HTTP requests.
HTTP requests and responses are sent across the Internet in plaintext. The problem is that anyone monitoring the connection can read these plaintexts. This is especially an issue when users submit sensitive data via a website or a web application. This could be a password, a credit card number, or any other data typed into a form. Essentially, a malicious actor can just read the text in the request or the response and know exactly what information someone is asking for, sending, or receiving, and even manipulate the communication.
The answer to above security problem is HTTPS.
What is HTTPS?
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (also referred to as HTTP over TLS or HTTP over SSL). HTTPS uses TLS (or SSL) to encrypt HTTP requests and responses, so instead of the plaintext, an attacker would see a series of seemingly random characters.
TLS uses a technology called public key encryption: there are two keys, a public key and a private key. The public key is shared with client devices via the server’s SSL certificate. The certificates are cryptographically signed by a Certificate Authority (CA), and each browser has a list of CAs it implicitly trusts. Any certificate signed by a CA in the trusted list is given a green padlock lock in the browser’s address bar, because it is proven to be “trusted” and belongs to that domain. Companies like Let’s Encrypt have now made the process of issuing SSL/TLS certificates free.
When a client opens a connection with a server, each machine needs a verified identity. So, the two devices use the public and private key to agree on new keys, called session keys, to encrypt further communications between them. All HTTP requests and responses are then encrypted with these session keys, so that anyone who intercepts communications can only see a random string of characters, not the plaintext.
In addition to encrypting communication, HTTPS is used for authenticating the two communicating parties. Authentication means verifying that a person or machine is who they claim to be. In HTTP, there is no verification of identity—it is based on a principle of trust. But on the modern Internet, authentication is essential.
Just like an ID card confirms a person’s identity, a private key confirms server identity. When a client opens a channel with an origin server (e. g. when a user navigates to a website), possession of the private key that matches with the public key in a website’s SSL certificate proves that the server is actually the legitimate host of the website. This prevents or helps block a number of attacks that are possible when there is no authentication, such as Man-in-the-middle attacks, DNS hijacking, and domain spoofing.
Differences between HTTP and HTTPS
Based on the above presentation of HTTP and HTTPS, the following table presents the main differences between those two protocols.
Table 1: Differences between HTTP and HTTPS
Conclusion
HTTPS comes with many advantages, both performance and, most important, security wise. All browsers are strongly encouraging users to trust only websites implementing HTTPS because this is the single measure that can help them mitigate a variety of threats and attacks.
Related Posts
How Long Can We Trust the Green Padlock?
Google vs. the Certificate Authorities: Are EV Certificates the Answer?
What is HTTPS and Why Don’t More Businesses Use It?
Google Has Increased HTTPS Use. Is That Enough?
Like this blog? We think you will love this.
Featured BlogTop Financial Services Encryption Threats and Insight from a Former Hacker! [Encryption Digest #65]
Read More
Subscribe to our Weekly
Blog Updates!
Join thousands of other security professionals
Get top blogs delivered to
your inbox every week
You might also like
eBook
TLS Machine Identity Management for Dummies
White Paper
CIO Study: Certificate-Related Outages Continue to Plague Organizations
About the author
Anastasios Arampatzis is a retired Hellenic Air Force officer with over 20 years of experience in evaluating cybersecurity and managing IT projects. He works as an informatics instructor at AKMI Educational Institute, while his interests include exploring the human side of cybersecurity.
Read Posts by Author
Sign up for Venafi Cloud
Venafi Cloud manages and protects certificates
*
Please fill in this field
Please enter valid email address
Show
Password must be At least 8 characters longAt least one digitAt last one lowercase letterAt least one uppercase letterAt least one special character(@%+^! #$? :, (){}[]~`-_)
Country
End User License Agreement needs to be viewed and accepted
Already have an account? Login Here
×
Scroll to the bottom to accept
VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE
*** IMPORTANT ***
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY BEFORE CONTINUING WITH REGISTRATION AND/OR ACTIVATION OF THE VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE (“SERVICE”).
This is a legal agreement between the end user (“You”) and Venafi, Inc. (“Venafi” or “our”). BY ACCEPTING THIS AGREEMENT, EITHER BY CLICKING A BOX INDICATING YOUR ACCEPTANCE AND/OR ACTIVATING AND USING THE VENAFI CLOUD SERVICE FOR WHICH YOU HAVE REGISTERED, YOU AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THIS AGREEMENT ON BEHALF OF A COMPANY OR OTHER LEGAL ENTITY, YOU REPRESENT THAT YOU HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO BIND SUCH ENTITY AND ITS AFFILIATES TO THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, IN WHICH CASE THE TERMS “YOU” OR “YOUR” SHALL REFER TO SUCH ENTITY AND ITS AFFILIATES. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE SUCH AUTHORITY, OR IF YOU DO NOT AGREE WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, YOU MUST NOT ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT AND MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE.
You shall not access the Service if You are Our competitor or if you are acting as a representative or agent of a competitor, except with Our prior written consent. In addition, You shall not access the Service for purposes of monitoring its availability, performance or functionality, or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes, and you shall not perform security vulnerability assessments or penetration tests without the express written consent of Venafi.
This Agreement was last updated on April 12, 2017. It is effective between You and Venafi as of the date of Your accepting this Agreement.
The Venafi Cloud Service includes two separate services that are operated by Venafi as software as a service, each of which is separately licensed pursuant to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and each of which is considered a Service under this Agreement: the Venafi Cloud Risk Assessment Service or the Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service. Your right to use either Service is dependent on the Service for which You have registered with Venafi to use.
Definitions
“Your Data” means electronic data and information submitted by or for You to the Service or collected and processed by or for You using the Service.
License Grants and Restrictions
License Grant by Venafi to You. Venafi grants to You a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-assignable, limited license (the “License”) to access and use the Service during the applicable License Term set out in Section 2. 2 below, in accordance with the instructions contained in the user documentation that accompanies the Service (“Documentation). Venafi hereby grants to You the right to use the Documentation solely in connection with the exercise of Your rights under this Agreement. Other than as explicitly set forth in this Agreement, no right to use, copy, display, or print the Documentation, in whole or in part, is granted. This license grant is limited to internal use by You. This License is conditioned upon Your compliance with all of Your obligations under this Agreement. Except for the express licenses granted in this Section, no other rights or licenses are granted by Venafi, expressly, by implication, by way of estoppel or otherwise. The Service and Documentation are licensed to Licensee and are not sold. Rights not granted in this Agreement are reserved by Venafi.
License Term.
Venafi Cloud Risk Assessment Service. If you have registered to access and use the Venafi Cloud Risk Assessment Service, Your right to use the Venafi Cloud Risk Assessment Service is limited to ninety (90) days from the date You first register for the Service, unless otherwise extended on Your agreement with Venafi.
Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service. If you have registered to access and use the Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service, Your right to use the Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service shall extend indefinitely and may be terminated by either You or Venafi at any time for any reason.
Restrictions on Use. The grant of rights stated in Sections 2. 1 and 2. 2, above, is subject to the following restrictions and limitations:
If You have registered to access and use the Venafi Cloud for DevOps Service, You must use SSL/TLS certificates issued to you at no charge through the Service for development and testing purposes only, and You are strictly prohibited from using such SSL/TLS certificates in a production environment or in any production capacity. If you are registered with a public Certification Authority (“CA”) supported by the Service and have valid credentials issued by such CA with which you can subscribe to such CA’s SSL/TLS certificates on a fee bearing basis for use in production environments, You may request such certificates through the applicable interface present in the Service by using such credentials. In such instance, the fee bearing certificate(s) will be issued to You by the CA and any access to or use of such certificates by You will be subject to the terms and conditions set out by the CA. No fees will be paid to or processed by Venafi in this case. The use of DigiCert issued certificates shall be subject to the Certificate Services Agreement published by DigiCert at, which terms are hereby incorporated by reference.
You shall not use (or cause to be used) the Service for the benefit of any third party, including without limitation by rental, in the operation of an Applications Service Provider (ASP) service offering or as a service bureau, or any similar means.
You shall not distribute access to the Service, in whole or in any part, to any third party or parties. You shall not permit sublicensing, leasing, or other transfer of the Service.
You shall not (a) interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the Service or third-party data contained therein, (b) attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or its related systems or networks, (c) permit direct or indirect access to or use of the Service in a way that circumvents a contractual usage limit, or (d) access the Service in order to build a competitive product or service.
License Grant by You. You grant to Venafi and its affiliates, as applicable, a worldwide, limited-term license to host, copy, transmit and display Your Data as necessary for Venafi to provide the Service in accordance with this Agreement. Subject to the limited licenses granted herein, Venafi acquires no right, title or interest from You or any of Your suppliers or licensors under this Agreement in or to Your Data.
Ownership
Venafi Materials. Venafi and/or its suppliers have and shall retain ownership of all right, title and interest in and to the Service and the Documentation and all intellectual property rights embodied in the Service and Documentation, including without limitation any patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets in the Service and any modifications and/or derivatives thereof, whether or not made at Licensee’s request, and all know-how, concepts, methods, programming tools, inventions, and computer source code developed by Venafi (collectively, “Venafi Materials”).
Limited Feedback License. You hereby grant to Venafi, at no charge, a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable license under Your intellectual property rights in and to suggestions, comments and other forms of feedback (“Feedback”) regarding the Service provided by or on behalf of You to Venafi, including Feedback regarding features, usability and use, and bug reports, to reproduce, perform, display, create derivative works of the Feedback and distribute such Feedback and/or derivative works in the Service. Feedback is provided “as is” without warranty of any kind and shall not include any of Your confidential information.
Disclaimer of Warranties
EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY SET FORTH IN THIS SECTION 4, THE SERVICE AND DOCUMENTATION ARE PROVIDED “AS-IS, ” WITH “ALL FAULTS” AND “AS AVAILABLE, ” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, OR NONINFRINGEMENT WHETHER ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING, USAGE, TRADE PRACTICE OR ANY OTHER MANNER. VENAFI IS NOT OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE ANY UPDATES, UPGRADES OR TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR THE SERVICE. VENAFI DISCLAIMS ALL LIABILITY AND INDEMNIFICATION OBLIGATIONS FOR ANY HARM OR DAMAGES CAUSED BY ANY THIRD-PARTY HOSTING PROVIDERS. In no event does Venafi warrant that the Service is error free or that You will be able to operate the Service without problems or interruptions. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties and to the extent that is the case the above exclusion may not apply.
Limitation of Liability
IN NO EVENT WILL VENAFI OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST REVENUE, PROFIT, OR DATA, OR FOR DIRECT, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES HOWEVER CAUSED AND REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICE EVEN IF VENAFI OR ITS SUPPLIERS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. Some jurisdictions do not allow the limitation or exclusion of liability for incidental or consequential damages and to the extent that is the case the above limitation or exclusion may not apply to You.
Term and Termination
This License is effective until terminated as set forth herein or the License Term expires and is not otherwise renewed by the parties. Venafi may terminate this Agreement and/or the License at any time with or without written notice to You if You fail to comply with any term or condition of this Agreement or if Venafi ceases to make the Service available to end users. You may terminate this Agreement at any time on written notice to Venafi. Upon any termination or expiration of this Agreement or the License, You agree to cease all use of the Service if the License is not otherwise renewed or reinstated. Upon termination, Venafi may also enforce any rights provided by law. The provisions of this Agreement that protect the proprietary rights of Venafi will continue in force after termination.
Compliance With Laws
Violation of Laws. You shall not knowingly take any action or omit to take any action where the reasonably predictable result would be to cause Venafi to violate any applicable law, rule, regulation or policy and, to the extent not inconsistent therewith, any other applicable law, rule, regulation and policy.
Governing Law
This Agreement shall be governed by, and any arbitration hereunder shall apply, the laws of the State of Utah, excluding (a) its conflicts of laws principles; (b) the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods; (c) the 1974 Convention on the Limitation Period in the International Sale of Goods; and (d) the Protocol amending the 1974 Convention, done at Vienna April 11, 1980.
General
This Agreement is binding on You as well as Your employees, employers, contractors and agents, and on any permitted successors and assignees. Except if otherwise superseded in writing by a separately executed agreement, this Agreement is the entire agreement between You and Venafi with regard to the License granted hereunder, and You agree that Venafi will not have any liability for any statement or representation made by it, its agents or anyone else (whether innocently or negligently) upon which You relied in entering into this Agreement, unless such statement or representation was made fraudulently. This Agreement supersedes any other understandings or agreements, including, but not limited to, advertising, with respect to the Service. If any provision of this Agreement is deemed invalid or unenforceable by any country or government agency having jurisdiction, that particular provision will be deemed modified to the extent necessary to make the provision valid and enforceable and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect. Should such modification be impractical or denied, You and Venafi shall thereafter each have the right to terminate this Agreement on immediate notice.
Survival. The parties agree that the rights and obligations set forth in the above-referenced Section 1 (Definitions), 3 (Ownership), 4 (Disclaimer of Warranties), 5 (Limitation of Liability), 6 (Term and Termination), 7 (Compliance with Laws), 8 (Governing Law), and 9 (General) shall survive the termination of this Agreement for any reason and enforcement thereof shall not be subject to any conditions precedent.
Assignment. This Agreement shall be binding upon and inure to the benefit of the parties’ respective successors and permitted assigns. You shall not assign this Agreement or any of Your rights or obligations hereunder without the prior written consent of Venafi and any such attempted assignment shall be void.
HTTP vs HTTPS: The Difference And Everything You Need To …
Many websites use HTTP. However, back in 2014, Google recommended that sites switch to HTTPS. Until then, only sites with e-commerce pages really bothered to use HTTPS.
As an incentive for switching over, Google announced that it would be providing HTTPS sites with a minor rankings bump, in effect punishing sites that did not switch over by giving an edge to competitors that did.
Now you’re probably wondering – why is it so important that you switch over to HTTPS? Is it really worth the hassle to do so? What even is the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?
Will using one over the other affect your SEO efforts at all? The following guide will break everything down for you, not only answer these common questions but giving you a much better understanding of HTTP vs HTTPS in general.
Here’s a quick video summarizing the points if you’re in a rush:
1) HTTP vs HTTPS: Understanding The Basics
The first thing that we should go over is what HTTP and HTTPS actually are. It’s going to be difficult to understand the impact of switching from one to the other or how to choose between HTTP vs. HTTPS without a general understanding of both.
What Is HTTP?
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. At it’s most basic, it allows for the communication between different systems. It’s most commonly used to transfer data from a web server to a browser in order to allow users to view web pages. It’s the protocol that was used for basically all early websites.
What Is HTTPS?
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. The problem with the regular HTTP protocol is that the information that flows from server to browser is not encrypted, which means it can be easily stolen. HTTPS protocols remedy this by using an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate, which helps create a secure encrypted connection between the server and the browser, thereby protecting potentially sensitive information from being stolen as it is transferred between the server and the browser.
What is the main difference between HTTP and HTTPS?
The most important difference between the two protocols is the SSL certificate. In fact, HTTPS is basically an HTTP protocol with additional security. However, this additional security can be extremely important, especially for websites that take sensitive data from its users, such as credit card information and passwords.
How do HTTPS works? The SSL certificate encrypts the information that users supply to the site, which basically translates the data into a code. Even if someone manages to steal the data being communicated between the sender and the recipient, they would not be able to understand it due to this encryption.
But in addition to adding that extra layer of security, HTTPS is also secured via TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol. TLS helps provide data integrity, which helps prevent the transfer of data from being modified or corrupted, and authentication, which proves to your users that they are communicating with the intended website.
Users can identify whether a site uses HTTPS protocol by the web address. The very first part of the web address (before the “www”) indicates whether the site uses HTTP or HTTPS protocols.
So, to recap, the difference between HTTP vs HTTPS is simply the presence of an SSL certificate. HTTP doesn’t have SSL and HTTPS has SSL, which encrypts your information so your connections are secured. HTTPS also has TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol that HTTP lacks. HTTPS is more secure than HTTP.
2) Which is better, HTTP or HTTPS?
If you’re looking at the main difference between HTTP and HTTPS, HTTPS obviously has a big advantage. After all, wouldn’t you want your site to be as secure as possible? The thing is, if you don’t have an e-commerce page and you’re not accepting potentially sensitive information from your website’s visitors, then you might be thinking that switching over to an HTTPS site isn’t that necessary and that doing so is a bigger hassle than it’s worth.
However, the security advantage isn’t the only benefit of using HTTPS. In fact, switching over to HTTPS can end up boosting your SEO efforts as well. The following are a few ways in which HTTPS can help to improve your SEO:
Increase Your Website Rankings
If you are wondering, is HTTPS good for SEO? Heck yeah, HTTPS matters to SEO!
Because besides the fact that Google itself has announced that sites switched to HTTPS will receive a small bump in rankings, doing so can lead to you website’s ranking boost over time in any event because visitors will be more likely to browse through sites that they know are secure.
If your website is new, you can read our guide here on how to increase your website rankings immediately with SEO.
Preserve Referrer Data
Also, the use of an HTTPS site makes Google Analytics more effective. This is because the security data of the website that referred to you are saved with the use of HTTPS – it’s not with HTTP sites. With HTTP sites, referral sources will just appear as “direct traffic”. This gives HTTPS a big advantage for SEO in itself.
Build Trust With Visitors
Because an HTTPS site encrypts all communication, visitors will have protection on not only their sensitive information, like passwords and credit card information, but also their browsing history. Knowing that they will retain their privacy while browsing your site and knowing that anything that they download, sign up for or purchase won’t put them at risk due to a lack of security is going to help you to build trust, which is vital to capturing leads and closing sales.
Additionally, HTTPS protects your site from security breaches, which can end up damaging your reputation and even costing you money if they do occur.
Eligibility for Creating AMP Pages
If you want to be able to use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), then you’ll need to have HTTPS.
AMP was created by Google as a way to load content onto mobile devices at a much faster rate. At its core, AMP is kind of like a stripped-down HTML. AMP content is featured prominently on Google’s SERPs to create a better mobile experience for smartphone and tablet users.
If creating a mobile-friendly website is important to you (and it should be, considering the increasing importance of mobile search rankings and local SEO), then switching to HTTPS is a must.
3) SEO Concerns When Switching To HTTPS
While there are many benefits to switching over from HTTP to HTTPS, there are still a few potential problems that you could run into when doing so. The following are some of the tips you should be sure to keep in mind when switching over to HTTPS to prevent potential SEO-related issues:
Inform Google that you have switched from HTTP to ’s not some kind of automatic notification that lets them know when you’ve switched, which means that the rankings boost that they have promised may not occur until they crawl your site again. That can take a while unless you notify them yourself right are several certificates other than the SSL include Single Domain, Multiple Domain, and Wildcard SSL certificates. A Single Domain certificate is issued for one domain or subdomain. A Multiple Domain certificate, which is also known as a Unified Communications certificate, lets you secure a primary domain name and upwards of 99 additional Subject Alternative Names. Wildcard certificate allows you to secure your website URL as well as unlimited sure you use relative URLs for any is to reside on the same secure domain and protocol relative URLs for all other sure that you’re not preventing Google from crawling your HTTPS they are unable to access your to get clear instructions on crawling through your site, it could end up hurting your ability to improve your SEO, thereby hurting your potential search ranking. This generally happens if you forget to update your test server to allow sure that you allow search engines to index your have the option of discouraging search engines from doing this, but this could damage your SEO efforts since your page rankings will then be wiped out – and it could take a while for you to regain vigilant about tracking your migration from HTTP to can do this by using Google Webmaster Tools and other analytics software to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Also useful to catch any issues as soon as possible so that they don’t end up hurting your SEO.
4) Process Of Changing From HTTP To HTTPS
How to switch to HTTPS?
Now that you understand the benefits of switching to HTTPS and how to avoid any issues while migrating, it’s time to actually switch from HTTP to HTTPS. The process of switching to HTTPS may take a number of steps to accomplish, but overall, it’s actually not that difficult – just a little bit time-consuming. The following are the steps that you will need to take in order to switch to HTTPS:
It may take a while to get your site completely migrated to HTTPS, but it’s worth it in the end. Just make sure that you check all of the links throughout your site to make sure that they are properly updated or else they will break after migration.
Conclusion
You want your website to be secure for a number of reasons. Not only do you want to protect potentially sensitive information, but you’ll want to make sure that your visitors are comfortable browsing through your site.
These reasons alone are a good reason to switch from HTTP to HTTPS. However, when you consider the effect that switching to HTTPS will have on your SEO, it becomes a no-brainer.
If you have yet to switch your website to HTTPS, then you should take the time to do so. Yes, there are a number of steps involved, but the effort it will take is well worth the result.
HTTPS has already become the standard protocol, which means that the longer that you hesitate, the more of a chance there is that you’ll fall behind your competition.
If you have already switched your website to HTTPS, know that this is only just a beginning to building your website SEO.
Then again, HTTPS setup is only one of the factors affecting your ranking. You also have to look at how your content and website fare against the Top 20 pages ranking in the SERPs.
The latest key that determines if your website or content ranks for your keyword is if it is relevant to your context.
This is driven by Google’s latest implementation of word2vec that looks to improve performance in NLP. However, these high dimensional word vectors have been very difficult to interpret manually.
The best we could do is to analyze your website content against the current top 10 rankings for the keywords and see if there is any content gap or relevant information missing from our own.
This was our bid in answering if the content truly answers the search intent. But now, we can actually analyze our content’s Word Vector using BiQ’s Content Intelligence.
It actually provides real-time content analysis and compare your content against the Top 10 rankings for your keyword and let you discover the areas you can improve and optimize.
Besides, it’s easy to use. Just paste your target keyword and URL page and you will be able to identify the most critical on-page SEO issues on your content and fix them with the optimization suggestions to get the traffic that your content truly deserves.
Explore and see how much your content score with BiQ’s Content Intelligence.
Before anything, it’s time for a review. Are you clear about the differences between HTTP vs HTTPS and its SEO benefits now? Spend 5 minutes on our SEO Quiz to test out your skills to make sure you’re on the right track! Test Your SEO Knowledge – SEOPressor
Updated: 16 October 2021
About Lo Jia Thong
A polyglot plummeted into the deep blue world of SEO and inbound marketing armed with a burning passion on letters and a fascination on how thing rolls in the world wide web.
A milestone for Chrome security: marking HTTP as “not secure”
Security has been one of Chrome’s core principles since the beginning—we’re constantly working to keep you safe as you browse the web. Nearly two years ago, we announced that Chrome would eventually mark all sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure”. This makes it easier to know whether your personal information is safe as it travels across the web, whether you’re checking your bank account or buying concert tickets. Starting today, we’re rolling out these changes to all Chrome users.
Starting in the latest version of Chrome (68), you’ll see a new “not secure” notification when visiting HTTP pages.
More encrypted connections, more securityWhen you load a website over plain HTTP, your connection to the site is not encrypted. This means anyone on the network can look at any information going back and forth, or even modify the contents of the site before it gets to you. With HTTPS, your connection to the site is encrypted, so eavesdroppers are locked out, and information (like passwords or credit card info) will be private when sent to the ’s “not secure” warning helps you understand when the connection to the site you’re on isn’t secure and, at the same time, motivates the site’s owner to improve the security of their site. Since our announcement nearly two years ago, HTTPS usage has made incredible progress. We’ve found in our Transparency Report that:76 percent of Chrome traffic on Android is now protected, up from 42 percent85 percent of Chrome traffic on ChromeOS is now protected, up from 67 percent83 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default, up from 37We knew that rolling out the warning to all HTTP pages would take some time, so we started by only marking pages without encryption that collect passwords and credit card info. Then we began showing the “not secure” warning in two additional situations: when people enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode. Eventually, our goal is to make it so that the only markings you see in Chrome are when a site is not secure, and the default unmarked state is secure. We will roll this out over time, starting by removing the “Secure” wording in September 2018. And in October 2018, we’ll start showing a red “not secure” warning when users enter data on HTTP pages.
In October’s version of Chrome (70), you’ll see a red “not secure” notifications when you enter data on an HTTP page.
Making encryption easyIf you’re a site owner looking to migrate (or build! ) your site on HTTPS, we’ve helped make the process as simple and inexpensive as possible. Improvements include managed HTTPS for Google App Engine, required and automatic HTTPS on all domains, and free and automated certificates through Let’s Encrypt (Chrome is a Platinum sponsor). And if you’re in the process of migrating to HTTPS, look out for messages coming from Search Console with further information and when you’re shopping for concert tickets or online banking, rest assured: you’ll be warned if a site is not protecting your data with HTTPS. And we’ll continue to improve Chrome’s security, to make sure you’re using the most secure browser out there.
Frequently Asked Questions about https vs http difference
Is Google HTTP or HTTPS?
Many websites use HTTP. However, back in 2014, Google recommended that sites switch to HTTPS.Nov 21, 2019
Why is HTTP not safe?
When you load a website over plain HTTP, your connection to the site is not encrypted. This means anyone on the network can look at any information going back and forth, or even modify the contents of the site before it gets to you.Jul 24, 2018
When should you use HTTP over HTTPS?
In short, HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP. This safety afforded by HTTPS ensures users’ information is secure in three layers: Encryption: This helps ensure a user’s activity can’t be tracked or their information be stolen.
