Given the ease with which “Bad Guys” can intercept public WiFi traffic it becomes increasingly irresponsible to have any sort of data entry capability on your website if you aren’t using https:

Now with the availability of Let’s Encrypt, a free service providing SSL Certificates, there really is no excuse not to switch over https://letsencrypt.org/

From today this website will support https: for all public pages and that’s working well. Behind the scenes there are various private pages and custom scripting that will continue to work as both http: and https: in the short term.

Why not just switch everything over?

Let’s Encrypt will only issue certificates for a publicly facing website, this has proved a bit of a difficulty in testing on backup systems without a public interface. Self issued certificates generate a variety of warnings and errors in most browsers resulting in final testing being done on a live system. The primary problem encountered was mixing our https: frame with an internal http: page, all of these links need to be altered so that the http: pages open in their own tab instead of in the frame as before.

For anyone with a relatively simple website, you should seriously look at using https:, we are seeing client sites gaining noticeably improved positions in search results after doing this.