All future visits to NonprofitWP.org will now be encrypted with an SSL certificate and visited at httpS://nonprofitwp.org.
That little green icon means a few different things:
- The traffic between your browser and this website is now encrypted, so all site visitors have more privacy.
- The site is now served using HTTP/2 which requires HTTPS and is much faster!
- The site may rank better in search engines since at least Google considers sites with HTTPS to be more secure.
- The site is more secure, for instance, by better protecting my admin password when I sign in to edit the site.
While I won’t take the time right now to explain the steps required to make sure WordPress works correctly with HTTPS, it’s not too hard for someone with a little technical savvy and if enough people request it, I’ll add a page to the guide.
Thank You SiteGround
Until recently, doing this would require an $80+ “SSL certificate” from my webhost. Luckily, my host SiteGround was one of the very first shared hosts to offer both HTTP/2 support and free SSL certificates via the Let’s Encrypt initiative.
Over the next few years, I expect most sites to move to HTTPS for the speed, security/privacy, and search engine ranking benefits now that there is a way to do so for free. What used to be used to just protect sensitive information like credit card numbers is becoming more available to protect all our web traffic and with added benefits!