Over the past 6 months, BuzzCommerce has noticed a recurring theme amongst businesses: they aren’t receiving adequate support for ongoing website management. Unfortunately, this lack of support is likely to affect businesses in a massive way over the next few months due to a significant change in web standards. For websites that don’t meet these standards, expect large dropoffs in traffic, fewer ecommerce sales and fewer people signing up to your newsletter or filling out the contact form.
Read on to find out what’s happening (without all the techno-geek speak) and BuzzCommerce’s plan to save websites across New Zealand and Australia.
An encrypted Internet
The titans of the Internet world such as Google and Mozilla are pushing for an encrypted Internet. This is a direct response to government intrusion (NSA anyone?) and hackers. These titans would like every website in the world to be secured with an SSL/TSL Certificate. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificates encrypt any data sent between your web browser and the website’s server. Without encryption, hackers may be able to steal information such as credit card details or login details. Many of the big Internet players have come together to form Let’s Encrypt, a new Certificate authority. In a world first, they provide free SSL Certificates in a bid to make them ubiquitous across the Web.
What does an SSL Certificate look like?
Websites with SSL Certificates use the more secure HTTPS Protocol as opposed to the standard HTTP Protocol. Here’s what you see in the address bar of the Chrome browser when visiting a website with an SSL Certificate:
Here's a website without an SSL Certificate:
If we click on the ‘i’ icon we get this message:
I don’t have an Ecommerce website so why is this so important?
As we mentioned, big players in the Internet world such as Google are pushing for this. For a start, Google have announced they are giving preference to websites with SSL Certificates in search engine rankings. As SSL Certificates become more and more ubiquitous, expect your website to continue to drop in rankings and visitors if your website continues to do without one.
Google’s next step is a major update to their Chrome browser. Beginning in October, Chrome will label all HTTP pages as ‘Not Secure’ when entering any information into the browser:
Luckily, Google told us about this 6 months ago, giving web developers plenty of time to implement solutions. Unfortunately, we have found the majority of web development agencies have not set up SSL Certificates for the most of their customers. It seems most web agencies are more concerned about their current projects as opposed to the previous websites they designed or are hosting for their clients.
To make matters worse, it is expected that Google will eventually move to a red label and warning sign as it currently does with malicious websites:
As for Firefox, they have already started listing HTTP websites as not secure:
BuzzCommerce’s Plan
Besides not setting up SSL Certificates many agencies are not keeping their clients’ websites up-to-date. In the case of WordPress, it has regular core updates as do the Themes and Plugins. These are important not just for new functionality but to patch vulnerabilities. Essentially, there are thousands of New Zealand websites with huge security risks. WordPress is the most popular CMS, powering almost a third of all websites worldwide. As is the case with popular software, they become a target for hackers.
Many web agencies are letting their clients down in a massive way. But BuzzCommerce can save the day.
Introducing AutoPilot
AutoPilot is a new website management service specialising in WordPress. We do all of the important maintenance and management on your behalf, hence the name AutoPilot. It is essentially a web hosting service but with several key extras that make sure your website is properly maintained and kept up-to-date:
AutoPilot Hosting starts from just $30 + G.S.T. per month. We will get started by first setting up that all-important SSL Certificate. We don’t want your website suffering in search engine rankings or have the Chrome and FireFox browsers giving your website visitors security warnings.
Click here to learn more about AutoPilot.