Moving to https now vital in 2018 and beyond ?

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I know browsers started warning visitors of "insecure" websites or web pages that had forms, later this year they will start issuing this warning to ALL non-https websites .

With some pretty significant hints that HTTPS gives websites a small boost to encourage webmasters to make the change :

• Over 68% of Chrome traffic on both Android and Windows is now protected
• Over 78% of Chrome traffic on both Chrome OS and Mac is now protected
• 81 of the top 100 sites on the web use HTTPS by default

What is holding some websites back from making the change ? Do you have a website still using http ? What or why are you waiting ?

 

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I've been recommending the switch to https since 2015 ( Maybe earlier ). Out of a couple of hundred clients I've only seen one that had a detrimental effect, and that was mainly to do with a decrease in Adsense revenue . This was also way back in the early days when there was first talk of https going mainstream so we were well ahead of the curve, they had increases in traffic and search positions as a result of the move but because adsense and their advertisers we not ahead they suffered a revenue hit as a result.

I'd say 90% of websites migrated in the last 2 years however have shown very little movement in either direction, which should be seen as a success as many people are scared of the possible negative effects of a major change.

The remaining 10% have experienced great positive movements, id personally put weight on a combination of different aspects rather than putting the reasoning on https alone. Such as poorly configured websites and techinical SEO aspects such as redirects...which prior to the https switch.