Google’s Chrome browser to mark non-HTTPS sites as ‘not secure’ as of July 2018

Following their long standing push for websites to be ‘secure by default’, Google will soon be identifying insecure sites in their Chrome browser.

It’s looking like July will be an important month for Google. Early this year they announced their new update to promote page speed in mobile search results will be rolled out this summer

Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan write:

“The ‘Speed Update,’ as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

And recently they announced that their browser will also be marking sites as “not secure” if they have not migrated to HTTPS.

Google has pushed in the past for webmasters to switch over to using HTTPS web sites to increase security, referencing a possible small boost in rankings to incentivize people to make this change. The campaign has been widely successful. According to a post on Google’s blog, almost 70% of Google Chrome’s traffic is currently protected on both Android and Windows, nearly 80% of their traffic on the Chrome OS and on Mac is protected and of the top 100 web sites, 81 of them are using HTTPS by default!

Depending on the size of your web site, it can be a big job to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, but it is something that is going to be important to do in the near future.