Whether you have built your own website or hired someone to do it for you, it's now time to upgrade to the https standard. While this should be simple, it's not always that easy to do, even for someone who builds websites.
Let's start with why you want https. Google says it's good and will help your rankings. That's usually reason enough. Web browsers are also joining in, making it apparent when you're on a website that is not "secure." Even if people don't have to login to your site, they might want the assurance that it's secure.
Some of my websites will not get the https treatment because they are on an older server. These are mostly my own websites, so not a big deal. Now, it's probably possible for me to figure it all out for myself on those websites, but I don't have time to play around with them if it's not an easy fix right now, so some will just lose out.
Other websites are only sort of work. The ones I have on a CDN to help protect them from attacks don't work well once I add https. The menus disappear, and I can't find an easy way around it. These websites are only https for the non-www version, but the default version for the CDN is www, so those are a bit of a pain, and I'll probably have to drop the CDN and the hours I took setting it up if there's not a ready fix soon.
My last group of websites, generally my client sites, DO work on https, hosted by Siteground. It's a feature I didn't really have to turn on, but you don't know you have it working until you type in the https version of your website. This one works on www, too. The only issue you might have is on the website itself. I had to go into my Joomla sites and force https to all pages.
Webmaster tools also supposedly sees https differently from http. This means you're supposed to have all of the following version of your website listed there: http://, https://, http://www, and https://www. That stinks because I spent a long time creating just the http versions there. In addition, your web host might give you different numbers for visitors to the two versions of your website. This is a big deal if you are reporting to someone about monthly visits. I assume if you force the https, then the http visits should all but disappear, but I'm not sure if that's totally the case.
For now, it's worth converting my client websites. Since I want my own websites to rank well, I will also work on getting those done, too. If your organization is unclear how to do this or have a web designer telling you it can't be done for your site, then you can reach out to me.
