What is HTTPS?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site. Users expect a secure and private online experience when using a website. We encourage you to adopt HTTPS in order to protect your users’ connections to your website, regardless of the content on the site.

Data sent using HTTPS is secured via Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), which provides three key layers of protection:

1. Encryption—encrypting the exchanged data to keep it secure from eavesdroppers. That means that while the user is browsing a website, nobody can “listen” to their conversations, track their activities across multiple pages, or steal their information.
2. Data integrity—data cannot be modified or corrupted during transfer, intentionally or otherwise, without being detected.
3. Authentication—proves that your users communicate with the intended website. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks and builds user trust, which translates into other business benefits.

Best practices when implementing HTTPS

Use robust security certificates

You must obtain a security certificate as a part of enabling HTTPS for your site. The certificate is issued by a certificate authority (CA), which takes steps to verify that your web address actually belongs to your organization, thus protecting your customers from man-in-the-middle attacks. When setting up your certificate, ensure a high level of security by choosing a 2048-bit key. If you already have a certificate with a weaker key (1024-bit), upgrade it to 2048 bits. When choosing your site certificate, keep in mind the following:

• Get your certificate from a reliable CA that offers technical support.
• Decide the kind of certificate you need:
  • Single certificate for single secure origin (e.g. www.example.com).
  • Multi-domain certificate for multiple well-known secure origins (e.g. www.example.com, cdn.example.com, example.co.uk).
  • Wildcard certificate for a secure origin with many dynamic subdomains (e.g. a.example.com, b.example.com).

Use server-side 301 redirects

Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects.

Verify that your HTTPS pages can be crawled and indexed by Google

• Do not block your HTTPS pages by robots.txt files.
• Do not include meta noindex tags in your HTTPS pages.
• Use Fetch as Google to test that Googlebot can access your pages.

Support HSTS

We recommend that HTTPS sites support HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). HSTS tells the browser to request HTTPS pages automatically, even if the user enters http in the browser location bar. It also tells Google to serve secure URLs in the search results. All this minimizes the risk of serving unsecured content to your users.

To support HSTS, use a web server that supports it and enable the functionality.

Although it is more secure, HSTS adds complexity to your rollback strategy. We recommend enabling HSTS this way:

1. Roll out your HTTPS pages without HSTS first.
2. Start sending HSTS headers with a short max-age. Monitor your traffic both from users and other clients, and also dependents’ performance, such as ads.
3. Slowly increase the HSTS max-age.
4. If HSTS doesn’t affect your users and search engines negatively, you can, if you wish, ask your site to be added to the HSTS preload list used by most major browsers.

Consider using HSTS preloading

If you enable HSTS, you can optionally support HSTS preloading for extra security and improved performance. To enable preloading, you must visit hstspreload.org and follow the submission requirements for your site.