Hey, bloggers! Over here!

[Destiny]

Has everyone heard about how starting this October, Google is going to require your site to have SSL (https)?

[Josiah DeGraaf]

@destiny No… That’s something we’ve been meaning to do with KP, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Link?

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. Guiding authors at Story Embers.

[Hannah]

@destiny what does that mean exactly?

~I don’t know what I’m doing~

[SeekJustice]

@destiny, yes, what exactly does it mean?

INFP Queen of the Kingdom commander of an army of origami cranes and a sabre from Babylon.

[Rolena Hatfield]

@salome01w4g @seekjustice Hey!

So ‘http’ and ‘https’ are names of two protocols (computer rules) that govern how an internet document gets transmitted to your screen.

‘https’ means the web pages are secured against hackers.

So if Google is requiring sites to use ‘https’ I’m guessing they’re trying to protect sites from hackers. But I haven’t seen their announcement yet so I don’t know their intentions for sure 🙂

https://rolenahatfield.com/

[Hannah]

@rolena-hatfield hmmmmm…. still doesn’t make sense, should I be fine if I’m just using Blogger?

~I don’t know what I’m doing~

[Rolena Hatfield]

@salome01w4g Haha! I’m still not sure I understand it all either.
I don’t know if it’s required for us bloggers or not. 🙁

@destiny do you have a link describing Google’s requirements or did you just hear about it through word of mouth?

https://rolenahatfield.com/

[Destiny]

@salome01w4g @seekjustice @rolena-hatfield (and thank you for explaining it, Rolena 🙂 ), here’s some links to articles with more details:

How to Get a Free SSL Certificate (and Why Google is Forcing You To)

https://letsencrypt.org/

(I’m not sure if these will automatically become links or if I need to do something special to make them links, but you can copy the addresses and paste them into your address bar if they don’t work)

As far as I understand it, they mean any and every site/blog/page/anything-that-would-show-up-in-a-Google-search, no matter the platform (but if a Blogger site comes with the https built in, then I’m pretty sure you’d be okay Hannah. Plus Google owns Blogger, so probably you’ll be fine. I think.). Google is going to have a penalty of putting your site/blog VERY low in their search results/not show up at all if you don’t have SSL by October (Google doesn’t seem to be saying for sure one way or another that I’ve seen), so this probably wouldn’t be an issue if you just have a site as a creative output/hobby and aren’t really trying to build a large following.

SSL is something that you usually have to purchase, just like having your own domain. But there are a few hosting companies that give it to you for free if you host your site with them, one of them is Site Ground (which I use for my site).

You are especially supposed to have it if you’re going to be selling anything off of your site.

Although with WordPress, you sometimes also have to get an extra plugin. (@aratrea) if you’ve already got the SSL for your site, but it still is saying that your site isn’t secure, then that probably means that you’ll have to get a free plugin called ‘Really Simple SSL’ to fix the images that for some reason sometimes don’t get ‘secured’ even after you get SSL. I don’t know why. 😛

*clicks submit and hopes it doesn’t go all weird because it’s a bit on the long side* 😉

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