Director of AI & Automation

At Own, a Most Loved Workplace® certified employer in the Information Technology space, The leading data platform protecting and activating SaaS data at scale.

The cybersecurity world is full of acronyms. They might seem scary, but they shouldn’t be. Especially not HTTPS as it’s the opposite of scary - it protects your online traffic from snoopers. You may not be aware of it, but there’s no doubt you use it every day. Read on to find out more about HTTPS. HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It’s the secure version of the hypertext transfer protocol that underpins the web. In practice, HTTPS is what lets your browser talk to a website server in a private, authenticated way. When your browser connects to a website that uses HTTPS, the connection is wrapped in encryption through a technology called TLS (Transport Layer Security). This shields your requests and the website’s responses from anyone who might try to intercept or modify them as they travel across networks. Any website – especially those that require login credentials – should use HTTPS. Online banking portals, social networks, email services, online stores, cloud dashboards, and even small membership blogs all move confidential information. Without HTTPS, that information can leak in plain text. Modern browsers display a padlock icon and show “https://” before the domain name. If you see warnings about an insecure connection, expired SSL certificate, or plain “http://” in the URL, treat the site with caution. HTTPS and HTTP rely on the same underlying hypertext transfer protocol, but they handle security very differently. The HTTP protocol transfers data in plain text. If someone intercepts traffic on an HTTP connection, they can read everything you send, including passwords, form submissions, and personal information. This lack of protection opens the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, session hijacking, traffic manipulation, unwanted tracking, and injected advertising. HTTPS solves these problems by adding encryption and verification: Encryption protects data in transit so it looks like scrambled text — unreadable without the correct keys. Authentication proves the website is legitimate. A server must have a valid SSL certificate (or TLS certificate), which confirms that you’re speaking to the real site rather than an impostor. Integrity ensures the data sent between your browser and the server can't be modified on the way. Because of this, major browsers mark HTTPS as the standard and warn users when a website doesn’t support it. HTTPS transfers data packets between the client (like your phone that is requesting the website) to a server, machine, or application. While doing that, it also encrypts your traffic using asymmetric cryptography. To establish a secure connection, you and the server need to exchange public and private keys. In simple terms, they are a set of algorithms necessary for encryption. The public key is shared with the other party and is needed to send you encrypted messages, while the private key is used to decrypt those messages and should always stay private. But how does this work in practice? Through an SSL/TLS handshake. You send a “hello” request to a web server you want to communicate with. The server says “hello” back to you. It sends you a TLS/SSL certificate alongside its public key. Now you know that the website is legitimate, and you can establish a connection. Then you use the web server's public key to encrypt your public key, and you send it back to them. The server decrypts your key. You can now establish session keys that will be used for encrypted communication. Once session keys are exchanged, your connection becomes encrypted. If you run a website, switching from HTTP to HTTPS is no longer optional. Search engines expect it, browsers warn users without it, and visitors trust it. The migration process is not complicated, but it does require a few precise steps. To start, you need a valid SSL certificate issued by a trusted certificate authority. Options range from free certificates (via organizations like Let’s Encrypt) to paid versions with extended validation. Once you acquire it, install the certificate on your server. Configure your hosting platform to use HTTPS for all connections. Your certificate proves your identity to visitors and allows encrypted communication. After your certificate is active, the website needs a cleanup to ensure nothing points to old HTTP addresses. This includes fixing internal links so every URL begins with https://, updating media and script links (images, CSS, JavaScript) to load securely, and forcing HTTPS by setting up a 301 redirect to route all HTTP traffic to HTTPS automatically. If you don’t update these links, your site may show “mixed content” warnings, which reduce user trust. After your website is fully converted, notify the tools and services that depend on your domain. Make sure to submit an updated XML sitemap to search engines, add the HTTPS version of your site as a new property in Google Search Console, update your CDN’s SSL settings so cached assets are delivered securely, and update Google Accounts or other integrations that interact with your domain. Once you complete these steps, your website will serve secure HTTPS pages consistently across all platforms. Staying secure online is about building a set of reliable habits. Checking for HTTPS is one of them, but you still need tools that protect your accounts long-term. Strong, unique passwords are essential, and a password manager helps you create and store them safely. If you want an easy way to organize and secure all your credentials, try a dedicated tool like NordPass.

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