In 2015, Google announced they were going to give preference to website that offered their website with https:// in the url. If you are looking to boost your SEO, this is the most simple and cost effective thing you can do for your website. The price of an Secure Socket Layer certificate (SSL) is approximately $60/year and will give your website a boost in the rankings. It will also make your website more secure to all visitors, giving you the “lock” sign in your URL.
Many folks don’t realize that just because you’ve had your hosting company install the SSL certificate, and even if you replaced all your old http:// with https://, your site doesn’t automatically get served up to visitors as https. In fact, if you don’t specifically type https in the URL line, you may end up with an “not secure” symbol there instead, which can scare visitors off.
This is an easy fix! Once your SSL certificate is installed, insert the following code into your website’s .htaccess file and it will redirect all traffic to the https:// version of your website (even if they type in http:// instead).
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
Feel free to give us a call if you need help getting an SSL set up for your website.
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