I’ve been sounding the warning about the impending doom of unencrypted blogs for months, and now it’s crunch time.
Word to the wise: You need to install SSL encryption on your blog right now if you don’t want to endure a drastic reduction in traffic in early 2018.
Why do I say that, you wonder?
Well, the following things will soon begin to happen if your blog doesn’t have a valid SSL certificate installed and properly configured:
1 – The major search engines will boost the rankings of HTTPS pages over their HTTP competitors, in effect penalizing unencrypted pages in their search results.
All things being equal, your unencrypted HTTP pages will be relegated to the bottom of the digital barrel for their relevant search terms.
And that’ll be a pretty deep barrel considering that over 60% of all websites are now already encrypted, with more being encrypted every day.
Bottom line: Your unencrypted blog will almost certainly suffer a massive drop in search traffic in the new year.
2 – All the major web browsers will warn your visitors that your blog is unsafe, leading to a massive drop in confidence in its safety.
This dire warning will appear on every page of every unencrypted blog, even the ones that don’t use a form to collect credit card info or visitors’ email addresses.
And trust me, that warning will scare away many of the visitors who do manage to find their way to your blog after your search traffic takes a nosedive.
3 – All of those visitors hitting the back button after seeing the security warning on your pages will cause your blog’s bounce rate to skyrocket, resulting in even lower search engine rankings and search traffic.
4 – Since fewer visitors will see your blog, fewer of them will share your posts on social media. That means your blog’s “social proof” will drop, causing your search engine rankings to drop even more.
As you can see, your unencrypted blog will soon begin to spiral into a vicious cycle of ever-diminishing search rankings and traffic.
In short, the future is bleak for blogs that aren’t encrypted come 2018.
Ok, that’s the bad news. Luckily, there’s good news as well…
It’s now easier and cheaper than ever (as in FREE!) to get SSL encryption installed and working on your blog thanks to “Lets Encrypt”, “AutoSSL” and an awesome free WordPress plugin called “Really Simple SSL”.
This post explains how I used the awesome free tools listed above to encrypt RicksDailyTips and my other blogs. I recommend that you check it out and take steps to encrypt your own blog(s) right away. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.
By the way, your web hosting company probably already supports Lets Encrypt and AutoSSL. If so, a simple support request could be all that’s required to have them enable SSL encryption on your server. What’s more, the better hosts will do it for free!
If your host won’t do it for free, you might want to consider switching to a better hosting company. All of my blogs are hosted with inMotion Hosting for the reasons stated in this post.
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