Why An Encrypted Dental Website Is Now Essential
Don’t allow your website to show an insecure warning – get an SSL certificate now!
Back in February this year we wrote to over 300 of our dental clients to remind them of the impending GDPR regulations and what needed to be done with their websites to aid compliance.
One of these recommendations was the implementation of a secure website certificate to allow their web pages to be served under https protocol i.e. encrypted and secure. This is particularly important where information is being submitted via website contact forms.
Together with the GDPR https recommendations, we also mentioned how Google is becoming increasingly keen to see all websites published under https, not just those which process ecommerce transactions. Indeed Google has been encouraging this by offering “light” search ranking benefits for the last couple of years – i.e. a boost for SEO.
However as of this month, July 2018, Google is really starting to hammer home the point by not only increasing the SEO advantage for encrypted sites, but also marking non-encrypted sites as “not secure” in the Google Chrome browser. Version 68 of Chrome will show any users the “not secure” warning when they view websites without SSL certificates.
So why does this matter?
Actually it matters a lot and here’s why. First it pays to imagine what your potential new patient will think when they land on your website for the first time and an insecure warning pops up. There is a very high chance that they will go elsewhere very quickly!
Secondly, it’s very important to understand the statistics around the Chrome browser in that it is the most popular browser by a long way – approximately 60% of all users now use Chrome as their browser of choice. Incidentally, most other major browsers are expected to follow suit, indeed some have already.
What should you do?
This is actually now a priority for your dental website to avoid a significant number of lost enquiries. Your website designer will be able to switch your site to https for a relativity small cost and there is some additional work to be done to implement page redirects so that all existing website addresses divert to their new https equivalents. This should also preserve existing Google positions if done diligently and to best practice.
Additionally there will also be the cost of running an SSL certificate which is the small piece of software that’s sits on your website server to handle the encrypted communications.
Summary
Keeping your head down and avoiding https encryption for your website may have worked up until quite recently, but those days are past unfortunately. With GDPR, Google security warnings and the prospect of better SEO, now is the time to recognise the real importance and get your website converted to https. ASAP!
With over 200 of our client’s dental websites already converted to https, showing better SEO rankings and giving users full confidence, why not let Dental Media help you convert too? It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind so please contact us today on 01332 67258 to see what’s involved.