Website Hosting & Security

Website Hosting & Security

Is Your Website Secure?

Secured websites are important to protect both your site and your users from attack.

Cyber-attacks occur every 39 seconds and 43% of those attacks are targeted at small businesses.

To improve users’ privacy and security while browsing the web, Google has announced that their web browser, Chrome, will soon start blocking secure pages from loading insecure resources (images, videos, plug-ins, etc.). If your website is not secure, users will be shown a warning before being able to proceed to your site. This means customers are more likely to turn away and turn to your competitor.

You can tell whether a website is secure by looking for the padlock icon to the left of the website address bar. You can click on the icon for more information about the security of the page.

Insecure:                                                                Secure:

Negative Impacts to having an Insecure Site:

• Immediate drop in search engine rankings (SEO) – search engines favor secure sites
• Processing payments on e-commerce websites that are insecure have a greater chance to lead to identity theft.
• 85% of consumers say they abandon a purchase if the website is insecure.
• Increased vulnerability to hackers
• Customers will get warnings before the web page loads, making it unlikely that they will enter your site.

Secure Website but Insecure Plug-Ins and Content?

When you have a secure website, but resources, such as images, videos, plug-ins, etc., are insecure this is called mixed content because both insecure and secure content are being loaded on the same page. This degrades the security and user experience of your secure site, and the browser will tag your website as insecure.

Negative Impacts to having Mixed Content:

• Immediate drop in search engine rankings (SEO) – search engines favor secure sites
• Processing payments on plug-ins that are insecure have a greater chance to lead to personal information being stolen
• 85% of consumers say they abandon a purchase if the website is insecure.
• Insecure content allows access points to hackers
• Customers will get warnings before the web page loads, making it unlikely that they will enter your site.

How Do We Solve It?

Target Digital Solutions offers hosting/rollover services where we will conduct an assessment of your website to determine if your content is secure. If insecure content is found, we will make the necessary adjustments to the site to protect you and your clients.

When You Should Expect This?

The changes leading to the automated blocking of all mixed content in Google Chrome will be rolled out gradually, and spread out over multiple releases:

Chrome 79 – will arrive in December and will make it possible for users to unblock some blocked content on a per-site basis

Chrome 80– will arrive in January 2020, will tag websites as “not secure” if they load image content using insecure connections in the hope of motivating site admins to secure their image storage servers.

Chrome 81 – In February 2020, Google with auto upgrade all mixed images to HTTPS with the web browser to automatically block all of those that will fail to load over a secure server.