Why Every Marketing Product with Custom Domains Needs to Offer HTTPS
In 2016, the biggest content creators and eCommerce platforms on the web started offering HTTPS for their customers’ custom domains.
Shopify added this feature in February and Squarespace followed suit in October. Not to be left behind, startups like Strikingly, a website builder, launched a beta for their HTTPS custom domain feature a few weeks ago.
If you’re a marketing product that offers custom domains to your customers, offering HTTPS for your customer’s sites is a must. If you don’t, you risk leaving your customers unranked on search, untrusted by their potential customers and unnoticed.
Your Product Is More Than a Website Builder, It’s a Framework for Success
The web is moving to HTTPS — security on the web has become more of a concern, transitioning has never been cheaper, and the big players all agree: it’s time for HTTP to go! 2016 saw a large spike in the number of fully-qualified domains and certificates active:
In the past, SSL was something you would add on your site if you were handling super-sensitive information like bank details. But now, the web is moving towards an encryption-first model. There is a movement ensuring secure transmission as part of the fabric of the web.
Secure traffic is now fundamental to every website. Your customers need it, and they’re counting on you to provide it.
Your customers come to you to spin up a website without any code or technical expertise. Most of your customers are likely SMBs or individuals, who rely on your infrastructure to provide all the things they can’t do themselves. They aren’t well-known brands. They can’t afford an SEO consultant. So they need to get it all-in-one from your product — for $15/mo.
Offering HTTPS can help you offer each of these features to your customer in each critical step of their journey:
- First, potential customers find the site through search. SEO is how you ensure that your customer shows up for the relevant search result.
- Once the potential customer has clicked through, they need to trust your customer’s site to take the leap of faith and buy.
Offering HTTPS isn’t about a vague security concern or an obscure technical feature, it’s about getting your customers more customers of their own.
Soon, Without HTTPS, Your Customers Won’t Rank on Google
In 2014, Google began the discussion about HTTPS as a ranking signal. In an effort to ensure the websites people access from Google are secure, they started incorporating security as a lightweight ranking signal. Nothing major — they wanted to give people time to make the switch.
Between 2014 and 2016, there was a significant shift towards more HTTPS results appearing on Google Page 1. By January of 2016, over 30% of these results were HTTPS.
Then in 2016, Google announced an even greater emphasis on HTTPS. Starting in January 2017, they would start flagging non-HTTPS domains as insecure.
By April of 2017, that number had jumped to over 50%.
It’s clear that even a small update in Google’s Search algorithms created a ripple of change throughout the web. We know that Google will continue to increasingly distrust domains that don’t operate on a secure connection and will label them as such.
So what does that mean for you? Clearly there is pressure to switch to HTTPS. You should be giving your user’s the best chance to rank by allowing them to secure their sites. At this rate, it will only be a few years before it’s impossible to rank well without HTTPS.
Case Study: KickoffLabs Invested In Search To Increase Referral Value
KickoffLabs has helped its customers collect over 15 million leads by making it super simple to set up refer-a-friend style giveaways, sweepstakes and launches. Every marketing campaign lives on a separate KickoffLabs subdomain, which means that KickoffLabs has generated 1,000+ subdomains.
Its landing pages are optimized to encourage referrals and shares, but if these campaigns don’t rank for search, they’ll quickly decay in value and be undiscoverable after the initial social spike drops off. That’s why customers started heavily requesting HTTPS as a feature for their landing pages.
Partnering with Backplane allowed them to easily roll out HTTPS for their large number of domains without the need for large amounts of managerial work.
By offloading the work of generating and managing the secure certificates to Backplane, KickoffLab’s developers were able to satisfy customer feature requests and improve their customers’ ability to rank on search, without any ongoing management overhead.
Instill Trust with a Little Green Lock
Imagine you’re doing a bit of online shoe shopping and you see a picture of the perfect pair. But when you click through to the website, the first thing you see in the address bar is a red danger sign, much like the image below on the left. What’s your first reaction? If it’s to hit the back button, you’re not alone. Now imagine how a potential customer will feel if they see that on your user’s site. They won’t be coming back anytime soon.
But when you load a webpage like Dollar Shave Club and see that little green lock — you immediately know your information is safe. That’s the kind of feeling you want customers to associate with your user’s site.
That scary red “Not Secure” is Google’s way of shaming you for not securing your site. And for good reason. In today’s digital age, there is no such thing as non-sensitive web traffic. Every request made on an unencrypted webpage reveals information about the user’s behavior.
It’s become too easy (and unfortunately too common) to intercept and track unencrypted browsing. These sites offer a window for hackers to intercept and steal your customer’s sensitive data. Even if it’s just an email, your customers don’t want their emails floating around for spammers to find.
But encryption is important for more than just getting your customers to land. It comes into play when they’re doing your favorite thing: buying. As a marketing product, many of your customers will likely conduct transactions on their sites. But if a potential customer that’s primed and ready to buy gets to the payment page and sees that it’s not secured, they’re not going to feel safe about giving away their credit card information.
On the flip side, even if they don’t know the vendor, if a customer gets to the payment page and sees that it’s secure, it reinforces a sense of trust in the company.
A secured site will make sure that at every step of the customer’s journey, they’ll feel comfortable browsing and making a purchase, even without being associated with your customer’s well-known domain name.
Case Study: Etsy Helped Customers Trust Unique Domains
Etsy’s new product, Pattern, gave sellers the ability to create their own hosted e-commerce website. It takes the information from your Etsy shop, and hosts it on your own custom domain.
Now Pattern sellers could have their own brand identity outside of Etsy, while still taking advantage of Etsy’s e-commerce tools.
But that also meant these sites wouldn’t automatically have the security and sense of trust associated with Etsy’s domain name.
Even if the storefront appeared outside of the Etsy brand, Etsy wanted to make sure every Pattern site offered security to protect their customer’s sensitive information.
By adding HTTPS to every site, Etsy built trust and confidence amongst the sellers on Pattern, their customers, and themselves.
Be a Part of the Secure Web
HTTPS is transitioning from a feature to a requirement. If you’re providing a web presence to your customers, you’ll need to secure those sites with HTTPS if you want those sites to participate on the secure web at all.
Adding HTTPS to each domain provides your users with SEO and security benefits that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do themselves. Their potential customers will experience each of these benefits as they move through the journey of becoming a paying customer.
Your customers should be able to provide the same guarantee of security for their customers that you provide for them. This underlying trust will help improve your customer’s brand and ultimately, increase their conversion rates.
