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If you’re a small business owner, more than likely you have a website. Whether or not you sell services or goods online, securing your website for all visitors is critical to the success of your business.
Take a minute to see if your website is secured by HTTPS. If it is, great. If not, this should be something you consider for the following reasons:
Reason #1: Compliance with PCI standards
This is the big one. If your website processes credit card or other financial information, it is critical that it is secured by HTTPS. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, also known as PCI standards, are a set of security best practices designed to ensure that companies that accept, process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. These standards require that technology like HTTPS is used when cardholder data is being transmitted.
Reason #2: Make sure your website isn’t flagged “Not Secure”
When they’re not engaging with their mobile apps, individuals use web browsers to access the Internet. The Google Chrome browser (which represents about 60% of the market share for browser use) will automatically highlight websites that are not HTTPS encrypted with the words “Not Secure.” This warning may discourage customers from interacting with your company’s website and potentially keep them from doing businesses with you. As of this month, the Chrome browser will highlight this warning in bright red letters, ensuring that users make a note of it when they browse the Internet. Other web browsers, like Microsoft Edge and Firefox, also display similar signals when they load a website that is not secured by HTTPS. Therefore, to make sure consumers don’t receive this type of warning when they drop by your website, make sure that it is secured by HTTPS.
Reason #3: Improve your ranking on Google search
You want your business’s website to be noticed when your customers use their preferred search engine to access to web. As it turns out, Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal in its search engine. Broadly speaking, this means HTTPS-encrypted websites are prioritized on Google search (compared with websites that are not). Making your website HTTPS encrypted will help ensure your customers can locate your business’s website when they need to.
Reason #4: Protect you customers from malicious attacks and snoopers
HTTPS prevents certain bad actors from observing your customers’ browsing behavior. In the absence of HTTPS, a bad actor can use a variety of technologies to spy on a user and intercept their data when they access your company’s website.
Reason #5: Offer your customers a secure experience
Today, users are bombarded with news about hackers, data breaches, and evolving privacy norms. Many are losing trust in a number of different institutions, in the online world, and offline. Users want confidence in their online experience and thirst for a trustworthy e-commerce environment. By providing users with an extra bit of confidence in the form of a “Secure” notification or a small green lock on your website, you can help ensure that your business’s customers will continue to engage with your company!
Stay tuned for our next piece in the series—a deeper-dive into how the technology behind HTTPS.
The articles in this series on website encryption, created to support National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, can be found at https://www.bbb.org/bbbsecure/. Support for the program was made possible by our Corporate Trust Roundtable partners, Comcast and Facebook.
