Why is HTTPS important?
Security
As mentioned above, HTTPS makes your website more secure. This is very important when a user provides his personal information to you. The information can be anything from his contact details to credit card information or even medical reports of your patients. For webpages where users are required to provide such information, it’s critical to have security. With HTTPS, you are able to protect this data and ensure that only you can access it. There are three things that take place when you have an HTTPS website.
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Encryption
The data you receive from your clients cannot be read by anyone except you. How? The data is encrypted when clients send their personal information and can only be decrypted who has the key and that is you. Thus, when your clients browse through your medical website, no one can track their activities across multiple webpages and steal their information.
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Data Integrity
The data you receive from clients is original. It cannot be modified or corrupted during the transferring process.
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Authentication
Your clients are able to communicate with you without a third person. In other words, it prevents any party in the middle from attacking and trick your clients into thinking that they’re providing the data to you when they’re giving it to a scammer.
SEO
The second benefit of switching to HTTPS is because it is useful for SEO purpose. In fact, Google has considered HTTPS as a ranking factor. Although it may not make much of a difference to get more traffic to your medical website now, in the future, HTTPS websites will have more emphasis as Google considers security aspect very seriously. Thus, if you have an HTTPS medical website, then it boosts your chances of getting a higher rank on SERPs over other websites that do not use HTTPS. As your visibility increases, it will certainly increase traffic to your website.
Credibility
According to a European web security survey conducted by GlobalSign, 9 out of 10 users were likely to trust a website that displayed security indicators such as HTTPS.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org
The green “https” lock sign that is displayed in your browser assures the users that their personal information is safe on this website. Thus, the credibility of your medical website is established when you use HTTPS and they may even trust the professional services you offer. Moreover, if your medical website provides security, then your clients will be willing to provide you their information and even engage in buying your medical products online. This also leads to an increase in sale and profitability.
Better Referral Data
The HTTPS to HTTP referral data is now blocked by Google Analytics. This means that if your website is on HTTP and your content is shared on any HTTPS website, then the referrer data is all but lost. Furthermore, the traffic from the HTTPS website may end up under “direct traffic.” For example, if you have an HTTP medical website and you get a backlink from a popular website like Yahoo or Reddit which uses HTTPS. Now, this referral data cannot be seen in your Google Analytics and you may not understand where the traffic has actually come from. It is important to know where your visitors come from as it helps in optimizing your website and also planning your AdWords campaign.
How to Implement HTTPS
Thus, you see that switching to HTTPS can be beneficial for your medical practice. Therefore, it’s worth implementing HTTPS and taking advantage of it. Also, the cost involved in implementing HTTPS is low considering the long-term benefits it provides. But how do you migrate to HTTPS? To answer your question, follow these steps:
1. Choose a Type of SSL Certificate
SSL certificates are small data files which bind a key to a specific organization’s details. First, you need to install an SSL certificate on your medical website so that it can use HTTPS. Once installed, it allows secure connections between a web browser and the server. Some of the popular SSL certificate vendors you choose from include GoGetSSL and SSLs.com. There are three types of certificate you can get. They are as follows:
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Domain Validation: used for a single domain or sub-domain and is the cheapest among the three.
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Organization Validation: used for single domain or sub-domain but requires business verification and provides a higher level of security than domain validation.
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Extended Validation: used for single domain or sub-domain but business verification and provides a higher level of security than organization validation. It also includes the green address bar with the HTTPS lock in Chrome.
2. Create an URL Map of Your Medical Website and Redirect Old Webpages
You need to create copies of all your website pages and then redirect all your old HTTP webpages to new HTTPS webpages. This is because a small difference of the letter “s” in HTTP and HTTPS means that they are two separate URLs. If you use WordPress, then you can add the 301 redirects to your .htaccess files. When you create a URL map, make a list of all the old URLs along with the new URLs besides them. This will help you decide which URL needs to be replaced with the old one.
3. Update Internal Links
When you switch from HTTP to HTTPS, your internal links get affected. It’s important to ensure that your internal links point out to HTTPS webpages instead of HTTP webpages. In fact, this may be a time-consuming process to individually change these links. However, depending on the type of your website, there are some simple ways with which you can make these corrections. Contact your web developer to help you with this issue.
4. Update Other Resources
Apart from links, other resources such as images, scripts, and style sheets also get affected. Therefore, take care that all resources used and served on your medical website also use HTTPS. If not, then you need to point them to the correct HTTPS locations. In case, you have both HTTP and HTTPS URLs, then using a protocol relative URL will fix the issue. Usually, such URLs have a double slash ( //www.xyz.com) in front which directs your browser to use HTTPS in front of that URL when the file is requested from an HTTPS webpage.
5. Submit Your Website to Google Webmaster
Once your medical website is ready, submit it to Google Webmaster Tools so that the search engine crawls through it immediately. This will reduce the chances of your traffic being affected. All you need to do is add your medical website to Google Webmaster Tools as a new HTTPS website is taken as a brand new website. You can even submit your old and new sitemap so that Google will see the 301 redirects and make updates in its listings.
Once you complete these steps, test your medical website once again, just to be sure that everything is working fine. It might look like a time-consuming task but sooner or later it will become your priority when Google begins giving more importance to HTTPS websites for SEO purpose. Moreover, it is good practice to secure your customer information and your medical website. There are multiple technical elements that need to be considered when implementing HTTPS which a web developer should be able to take care of. Hence, it is best recommended that you contact a web development company and switch to HTTPS as soon as possible. Switching to HTTPS will not guarantee your medical website a top rank for a specific search query. It’s just one out of the many elements that search engines take into consideration for ranking your medical website. Therefore, if you need any help in optimizing your medical website to get more traffic, then contact a professional SEO firm.
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