Is Your Law Firm Website Using HTTPS?

Do you know the difference between HTTPS and HTTP protocol? First, let’s take a step back and explain both terms. The HTTP/HTTPS protocol is that weird beginning part of your law firm’s website URL. It’s parked in front of your site’s domain name, and it essentially governs how data is transferred between your website and the browser making a request to view your website.

HTTPS stands for “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure” and is the secure version of HTTP. HTTPS protocol means that all the communications between a website and web browser are encrypted. What this means is that no hackers or malicious software can intercept and understand the data behind an HTTPS protocol.

Other than the obvious perk of securing any data attached to your website’s contact form submissions, there are multiple benefits to using HTTPS protocol over HTTP. HTTPS protocol offers a slight boost in SEO, for example. Back in August of 2014, Google made HTTPS an official ranking signal, albeit minor.

According to a new study from Moz, 50% of page-1 Google results are now HTTPS. This number is up 20% from a study they did 9 months ago. Things are starting to ramp up. This is likely due to the extra pressure Google Chrome added back in October of 2016 when the browser started warning users about visiting non-secure webpages containing password and credit card form input fields.

The number of websites to adopt HTTPS is going to increase—there is no doubt about it. The Moz article projects that the number of page-1 results with HTTPS could hit around 65% by the end of 2017.

If your law firm cares about SEO as a means of driving traffic to your website to get new leads and is in a competitive local market where your competition is doing SEO as well, you should make the switch to HTTPS sooner than later.

For some of you, that switch is going to be easy. For others, it won’t. But that’s why we’re here to help.

Here at Legal InSites, we use WordPress as our content management system for every website we build. We then host them all on our favorite webhost, WP Engine. WP Engine makes it nearly trivial to order and set up the necessary SSL certificate required to start using HTTPS (notice I say nearly trivial—there’s almost always something to fix!).

Go ahead and get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more. We’re more than happy to help law firms put their best SEO feet forward while maximizing their website’s security at the same time. For us, HTTPS just makes sense. It should for you, too.