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HTTP to HTTPS Conversion

Secure your entire website to protect your business, customers, and search engine rankings
HTTP to HTTPS Conversion
HTTP to HTTPS Conversion

Security is always a top priority for websites, especially eCommerce stores. As technology has grown, so have the tools hackers and other malicious actors use to compromise vulnerable websites. The goals of these attackers can vary greatly — while the most obvious intent is to steal payment information, hackers can choose to target a website for any number of reasons, even sometimes just to prove they can. To fight back against this menace, Google has put forth an initiative that encourages websites to beef up their security by using sitewide HTTPS.

While Shift4Shop already provides strong protection for your customers' payment information via PCI certification, and for your business via 2-factor authentication and other measures, you can take additional measures to improve your security by converting your entire website to HTTPS. This will also bring your website into compliance with Google's current standards.

What is HTTPS?

What is HTTPS?

HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, which in basic terms is the format for transmitting information over the web. HTTPS stands for HTTP Secure, which is just like it sounds: the usual HTTP protected by SSL/TLS encryption. You are probably already familiar with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) being used to protect information when it's transferred over checkout pages. Sitewide HTTPS involves extending your SSL's encryption to cover every page of your website, which offers the more well-rounded protection Google is encouraging.

Why Google is Promoting Sitewide HTTPS

Why Google is Promoting Sitewide HTTPS

While checkout may be the most obvious target for a malicious hacker, resources across all parts of your website can also expose you to vulnerabilities. This is because regular HTTP does not provide a secure connection, so any part of a website loaded over HTTP can be intercepted and even replaced or edited by a hacker with the tools and know-how to do it. While this is rare on many platforms and doesn't mean your Shift4Shop store is at risk, Google doesn't discriminate when they make their recommendations, as their priority is to ensure a better, safer experience for the entire World Wide Web. Therefore, Google now promotes sitewide HTTPS for all websites.

What Can Happen if You Don't Use Sitewide HTTPS

What Can Happen if You Don't Use Sitewide HTTPS

Since Google is a leader in the establishment of internet standards, their support of sitewide HTTPS cannot be ignored. Web pages that aren't secured with HTTPS will suffer a loss of search engine ranking, as HTTPS pages will be prioritized in search results. Chrome, Google's proprietary web browser, is also planned to start blocking certain non-HTTPS content. Additionally, web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox protect users by displaying a lock icon in the address bar when a secure site is visited. The absence of this lock icon can make visitors think a website is unsafe, at which point they'll turn away.

How Our HTTPS Conversion Service Works

At Shift4Shop, we're ready to help you keep your website up to date with modern security standards. We can perform a sitewide HTTP to HTTPS Conversion on your website, which will help you take advantage of the SEO and customer experience benefits. Here is how the process works:

  • 1

    Order your HTTP to HTTPS Conversion below.

  • 2

    We will contact you to discuss any details of the service and to answer your questions.

  • 3

    We will then begin transferring your entire store to HTTPS, including everything below.

What's Included in Our HTTPS Conversion

Transferring your website from HTTP to HTTPS is a sensitive process and it's important to take the proper steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. For a smooth and trouble-free transition, we include the following:

What's Included in Our HTTPS Conversion

  • Ensure Robots.txt is not blocking HTTPS traffic from being crawled Ensure there are no Meta "no index no follow" tags blocking secure pages

  • Change Canonical Tag to be secure version of URL

  • Update all hardcoded links on your site's frame.html to be HTTPS

  • Update any third-party tracking scripts to ensure they are being called over HTTPS

  • Update any hardcoded assets (images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.) from HTTP to HTTPS

  • Run HTTPS validation to list any additional HTTP elements that might need to be updated or removed from the website

Important: By transferring the store to HTTPS, if the SSL certificate expires the store will be offline. We recommend renewing the SSL certificate for up to 3 years to avoid service interruption.

How Long Does the HTTP to HTTPS Conversion Take?

How Long Does the HTTP to HTTPS Conversion Take?

The estimated time to complete your HTTPS Conversion is 3 - 5 business days depending on the schedule. All projects are put into a schedule after receipt of payment. Projects are assigned on a first-come, first-served basis.

How HTTPS Can Benefit Your Business

Transferring your website to HTTPS will benefit your business in several ways by making your website more resilient and secure.
As a quick summary of these benefits, they can include:

  • Better search engine rankings: Converting your entire site to HTTPS will bring your website into compliance with Google's current security standards, which in turn will improve your search engine optimization, allowing pages from your website to attain a better rank in search results.

  • Improved customer trust: All pages on your website will display as secure in the customer's web browser, which tells them your site is safe and that you care about protecting their personal information. This leads to an increase in conversions and repeat customers.

  • Increased website longevity: As internet standards and technology continue to evolve, the requirements change for a website to remain competitive. Switching to HTTPS is one of many ways to future-proof your online store and keep it up to date.

Ready to get started?

See below to begin the process of securing your website with HTTPS.

Ready to Get More Visitors & Sales? Start Today

1. Enter the domain name where this app will be installed:
$400.00

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I switch my Shift4Shop website to HTTPS myself?

Yes, in keeping with the extreme degree of control Shift4Shop offers its merchants in regards to customizing their websites, we have included tools for making the HTTPS conversion yourself. However, this is a delicate and technical process that requires every step to be followed exactly, otherwise your site may experience severe problems. If you do not have complete confidence in your ability to do the HTTPS conversion on your own, we recommend letting our experts handle it for you.

Will the switch to HTTPS change the appearance of my store?

No, the HTTPS conversion does not affect the appearance of your website at all. This means your theme, branding, products, categories, blog, and all other pages will retain their existing visuals and layout. The transition to HTTPS takes place "behind the scenes" of your store, so the only element that will look different to customers will be the addition of the "secure" icon or label in the address bar of their browser. This will signal to them that your site is fully safe.

Aren't there drawbacks to using sitewide HTTPS? I heard that HTTPS will slow down my site.

No, there are currently no drawbacks to implementing HTTPS across your entire website. In the past, some HTTPS sites were slower, but the technology has improved since then. Shift4Shop websites are hosted on servers that are fully capable of loading HTTPS web pages to your visitors without any loss in speed.

Does HTTPS really improve SEO? I heard that SEO is actually harmed by HTTPS.

HTTPS provides a measurable and consistent benefit to SEO, and Google has used it as a ranking signal since 2014 (meaning, Google gives HTTPS web pages higher priority in search results). The idea that SEO is harmed by HTTPS comes from two main sources. One is that a web page's ranking may feel a slight impact at the moment of the transition, but this doesn't always happen and will recover quickly. The other source of this rumor is when a site performs the transition to HTTPS incorrectly. It's crucial for the webmaster to take the proper steps to ensure that the website can still receive traffic after the conversion. This is why we recommend that you take advantage of our HTTPS Conversion service rather than trying to perform the conversion yourself. Additionally, some website builder platforms don't allow sufficient access to the site's infrastructure to perform the change to HTTPS properly, so their users can run into problems. Shift4Shop does not have any of these issues.

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