Website Security Made Really Simple

If you're a burgeoning web developer, you might have run into a little problem with securing your website recently. With all the talk lately of identity theft, hacking this and phishing that, it seems pretty much essential these days to roll out some form of protection to shield your web presence with. A good start for many developers is to make the leap from HTTP to HTTPS, which will add a layer of assurance for your peace of mind and your visitors'.

The first way that you'd think to do it is by directly entering the editor and changing the main web page to HTTPS. This works, yes, but it creates an issue when your visitors are trying to bounce from the main page to the other non-HTTPS pages around the site. It seems like you have to manually change every address to make it work, and this is sometimes called a 301 error. If you have a small number of links to work with, the manual trick of ctrl+f and punching "HTTP" into the bar can be an efficient fix, but larger sites have other options.

The most notable is the Really Simple SSL plugin, which can mass-switch all of your HTTP protocol addresses over to the more secure version. This is the solution that most people find themselves turning to and never looking away from after they've given it a shot. This is great for solving a plethora of other 301 issues, which make up a good chunk of the problems that a web developer will commonly run into. The only problem is that when you go to update your publishing platform client, plugins always have a chance to, shall we say, not play nice with the new code.

Aside from the upside to security, it's also wonderful for getting your page noticed more on Google since the search engine prioritizes HTTPS over HTTP when displaying results. Naturally, this is a move on their part to promote traffic on safer pages. If you haven't made the leap yet, it's a one-time hassle that can be simplified with a plugin and bolsters your website's popularity overnight.