Is Chrome Identifying Your Site as Not Secure?

Seeing a Chrome “Not Secure” warning for your website?

This week (late July 2018) Google released the latest version of Google Chrome, which is currently the most popular web browser.

This new version of Google Chrome (Chrome 68) will explicitly mark all websites as insecure if they’re not using https (by installing and configuring a SSL certificate on your web server). If your website doesn’t support https, your visitors will see a Chrome not secure warning that looks like this:

Google’s been talking about making this change for several months. Originally the warning only showed on sites that were collecting form submissions, but as we’ve seen an increase in general privacy awareness Google decided that there’s no good reason why users of its browser shouldn’t expect https everywhere. Responding to this, pretty much all reputable web hosts now offer free SSL certificates through a service called LetsEncrypt. If you haven’t yet ensured that your website uses SSL, now is the time to contact your web hosting company to make sure that you’re set. If you use a good managed hosting company, they may have already set this up for you. If you have a common lower-cost shared host, you may need to make a configuration change or two.

As always, before making a configuration change such as this, ensure you’ve backed up your website.

Generally getting this set up will be a two step process: acquiring a SSL certificate, and then configuring your website software to use https by default for your site. Once you’ve done these things, the Chrome not secure warning should go away.

If you’re stuck and can’t figure out, I can help. Send me an email, let me know what software you’re using for your website and who is your web host, and I will let you know my fee to set up the SSL configuration.