After years of pushing for ‘secure by default’ web sites, Google will identify insecure sites in the Chrome browser beginning mid-July.
We have touched on this before in previous posts, but now is crunch time! It seems July is shaping up to be a big month for Google. The company announced its Speed Update set to roll out in July, and also announced it will then also mark all sites that have not migrated to HTTPS as “not secure.”
This move will coincide with the release of Chrome 68 and un-secured websites will look like this in a user’s browser:

Google has been pushing webmasters to make the change to non-secure web sites for years now – including hinting at small rankings boost to further incentivize the shift. The campaign has proved successful. According to their blog post:
- Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
- Over 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected
- 81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default
Depending upon the size of a site and scope of the project, a migration from HTTP to HTTPS can be quite an undertaking. We will be encouraging all existing clients and new clients to sign up for hosting with a security certifcate immediately and in the future!
To learn more, feel free to get in touch.