We’ll talk about what the HTTP and HTTPS are and why it’s important that you don’t let this issue go unnoticed. As you read on, we’ll go over a couple possible solutions that can fix this issue.
Every website should be protected by HTTPS and by the end of this article, you’ll learn why it is so important. Furthermore, HTTPS provides critical security and data integrity for your website and its users’ personal information. Therefore it’s no surprise that it’s required for many new browser features.
Every resource is exploitable, so even if you’re serving your website over HTTPS, you need to keep in mind that there could still be some resources that are served over HTTP. This is what we call mixed content, and it may be the reason why you’re getting this warning.
What are HTTP and HTTPS
First of all, let’s take a step back and first explain what HTTP and HTTPS are and what their differences are. HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol, which is essentially a syntax for presenting information when transferring it over the network.
There are two main types of HTTP messages we call requests and responses. Responses are basically answers to the requests. For example when a user interacts with your website and clicks on a link, their browser will generate a series HTTP GET requests to fetch all the resources needed for the page to load. These requests then go to either the origin server or a proxy caching server (CDN), which will generate an HTTP response for each request.
HTTPS on the other hand is basically just an extension of the HTTP, where S in the name stands for secure. It uses transport layer security (TLS) or secure sockets layer (SSL) to encrypt the HTTP requests and responses and digitally signs them.
Migrating your site to HTTPS
We’ll go over some of your options when it comes to actually dealing with the issue the PageSpeed Insights warns you about. Simplest solution you can opt for is hosting your site on a content delivery network (CDN). CDNs are usually secure by default.
In case you already serve your website over HTTPS and still get this warning, you may be dealing with mixed content issues. In this case, there’s a few things you need to do to root it out. First of all, you need to identify resources that are served over HTTP and check whether its HTTPS version is available or not. If it’s not, then you might have to consider choosing a different host that serves content over HTTPS in case you use separate hosts for your resources. If the HTTPS version of the resource is available however, you just need to switch the source path on your site.
Conclusion
To conclude, we talked about the basics of what HTTP and HTTPS are and how to fix the issue website evaluation tool warns about, which usually points to mixed content if you’re already serving your website over HTTPS.
