HTTPS Migration: Should You Do It and What It Means for Your Forms

You’d not want this to show up on your site (or online forms), do you?

Seeing this will definitely drive most, if not all, of your visitors away.

Your site will probably be marked red if it’s still on HTTP by October 2017.

Keep calm, you can avoid this situation. Read on.

If you want to know how it will affect your EmailMeForm forms and what you can do about it, you can skip to this blog post.

Google’s HTTP Purge

Google has announced that starting October 2017, Chrome version 62 will show a “not secure” warning on these 2 occasions:

• When users enter text in a form on a HTTP page
• On all HTTP pages in Incognito mode

This is the second step of Google’s move towards more connection security.

At some point, Google might also want to label all HTTP pages as non secure with a small red triangle on the top of our Chrome browser. An alarming small red triangle that can worry our visitors, leads, and customers, both new and loyal ones.

This might destroy our online reputation—we are doomed.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but here’s what this really means for you, your website and your forms.

What is HTTPS and what does it do?

HTTPS is an encrypted connection to a website. This means that in an HTTPS site, any information that you provide in the website stays secured and protected.

HTTPS has been used as a standard for shopping carts and website pages that require entering credit card and other sensitive information.

With the recent increase in privacy concerns among the public, online users want to protect their whole Internet experience by going incognito where possible.

This is why Google, Verizon and other reputable companies are trying to migrate the whole Internet to HTTPS. The upcoming changes to Chrome are necessary in achieving this.

There is also another benefit that motivates webmasters to migrate to HTTPS as soon as possible — SEO benefits: increased traffic and better rankings.

Google favors these secured websites and as a result, they get better rankings (simply because they provide safer and better user experience).

In short, migration to a secure connection gives you the following benefits:

1. Prevention of malicious attacks and data thefts
2. Protection of visitors’ privacy
3. Improvement in search rankings and SEO in general
4. User trust with the security certificates in modern browsers

However, it does include a couple of challenges:

1. Technical complexity (Implementation can be hard on complex websites)
2. Additional costs (SSL is paid usually on per year basis)
3. Temporary decrease in traffic (Search engines take a while to reindex the new pages)

Does this mean you should migrate your website to HTTPS immediately?

Yes, if you haven’t done so yet.

The HTTP to HTTPS migration is always a risky move and it can influence the website’s performance like rankings and traffic temporarily. However, the long term (and even short term) benefits are unquestionable. Significant increases in traffic have been reported regularly after the migration.

More often than not, your hosting company can help you get the SSL and connect it to your domain. They usually have a detailed guide on how to do it, where to buy one, and even point out some good deals in getting SSL.

But implementing the SSL is just the first step, what needs to be done after that is extremely important.

Alright, what are the next steps?

To ensure that the process goes as smoothly as possible, we have provided you with a checklist so you can do the necessary preparation before completely migrating to HTTPS.

To answer your “How to make my website HTTPS” questions and help you make the transition as seamless as possible, we have divided the steps into four different phases: preparation, migration, post-migration changes and monitoring.

Preparation

Before doing the migration, make sure that you:

1. Get the SSL and connect it with your domain
2. Prepare the spreadsheet of redirects (So you don’t lose the rankings and traffic)
3. Prepare the updated content with changed interlinks, which should now be HTTPS
4. Prepare the new sitemap.xml file with HTTPS versions of the pages

Migration

1. Do the redirects to HTTPS
2. Force search engines to crawl the new, https versions of your pages
3. Check robots.txt if anything needs to be changed

Post-Migration

1. Update social media links
2. Check sitemap again
3. Update PPC campaigns (like Adwords)
4. Update Google Analytics
5. Update email signatures
6. Check your CDN
7. Update any 3rd party software that has your URLs
8. Redesign newsletters and any banners that contain your URLs
9. Compare Page Speed
10. Update blog links

Monitoring

1. Monitor Webmaster Tools and any potential crawling issues
2. Monitor traffic and keywords
3. Check server logs
4. Do the QA for all the previous items

This checking process will ensure that your HTTPS migration has been done correctly, ensuring that no major issues on website will arise.

Here’s an infographic that you can save or share to keep track of all these steps.

What does all these mean for your EmailMeForm Forms?

EmailMeForm provides SSL encryption option to all our users. All EmailMeForms are SSL-encrypted. There will be no browser warnings, whether your form is embedded on your website or your users are viewing your hosted forms independently. Your website will be secured and the visitors’ privacy will be protected.

We are providing 256-bit SSL security. Our forms are secured with GeoTrust, a well known and bulletproof SSL company.

The Future with HTTPS

It is 2017 and webmasters are running out of excuses when it comes to migrating to HTTPS. Over 60% of the Internet pages are served in HTTPS already and this new Google announcement will push that percentage much higher in the upcoming months.

EmailMeForm is following the trend and we’re providing all of our users, including the free users, the HTTPS versions of their forms.

Since we are already the most affordable form builder on the market, this is the added benefit to the long list of great features that our forms provide. Try us out and join our family of happy users!

If you have any questions about HTTP to HTTPS migration and your forms, please contact our support team.

Aiza Coronado

Aiza is a Content Developer and Marketer at EmailMeForm. She easily gets upset when random dogs don't bark back at her hello's.