Upcoming security changes in Google Chrome - what you need to know
Monday, 10th October 2016
You may have read in the media recently about a change that Google are planning to make to their Chrome web browser in January of next year, where they will begin to display a warning on sites which request usernames, passwords or credit card information without a secure certificate (SSL) in place.
This post aims to explain the details and the impact on your website, and what you can do to make sure you are ready for this change.
An SSL certificate is a must-have if you are working in e-commerce and collecting credit card information directly. It was previously not as essential if you were using a third party such as PayPal or Sage Pay's Form system to collect the card details. Beginning in January 2017, as part of it's continuing efforts to ensure as much of the world wide web is as secure as possible, Google Chrome will begin to display the warning below if your website is collecting login or credit card information without an SSL in place:
What does this mean for your website? If you have an admin or control panel - as most of our sites do, Google will begin to display this message on your login page if your site doesn't have an SSL certificate installed. Additionally, if you collect customer information which includes passwords, or your site has a customer login form, Chrome will display this warning on those pages as well. We have never launched a website which collects card details without an SSL in place - so you do not need to worry about this side of things.
As well as the obvious and visible benefit of this error not being displayed to yourself or visitors to your website, having an SSL certificate installed can also provide a boost to your search engine rankings, as Google has increasingly begun to favour secure sites in its index recently.
Edward Robertson have a number of options for making your site SSL ready and we would be happy to discuss these with you in order to make sure your website is ready for this change. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss this further.
