I have recently transitioned my website from http to https. I did this for a number of reasons, one of which is that the major browsers are warning visitors that a site contains unsecured data if it does not have a security certificate. Whilst that does not matter to most of us, because we are not taking credit card information or asking users to register with personal information, I do believe that such warnings will scare less-informed people away from looking at a site. All of the NWS and NOAA sites have moved or are in the process of moving to https. The Met Office is using https. Weathercloud is using https. WeatherUnderground has moved about half of its stuff to https.
Moving to https is
not a trivial exercise! But it is doable; If I can do it, anyone can.
It's easy (and relatively inexpensive) to buy a security certificate and install it. The hard part comes after that. You have to chase down every http link in your site, internal and external, and change the references to https. This includes the scripts and other bits and bobs you might be running, including what's under the hood in the SteelSeries Gauges. I learned the hard way with SteelSeries that the gauges won't display until you go through each file and edit every http link.
When you are all done, you need to login to your Google Analytics account and change the setting from tracking http to track https. This allows you to start tracking https visits to your site without losing your history. Finally, you edit your .htaccess file to make a permanent redirect for requests on your site for http to https. There are some other things too, but I won't bore you.
Personally, I think this is something that Google (and others) forced on us, but since my site is the official site for our property owners association, I decided it would be easier to just make the move than to explain to everyone's grandmother that she won't lose her pension by checking the unsecured data on my weather page. I know you can tell people to just ignore the warnings or change your browser settings to turn off the warnings, but again, for me, in the long run it was just easier to convert the site to https.
Like most things I do, I was in over my head when I started, but I just Googled (using https sites only
) how to migrate a site from http to https and by the time I was done, I had learned how to do it.
I still have three links left on my site that are http - all having to do with loading information from WunderGround or the National Weather Service, but I assume that those sites will sooner or later transition over. Mixed content (an https page that contains data loaded by http) by default is flagged as unsecured.
I am posting this just in case anyone else is trying to decide whether or not to make the jump. It seems quite daunting but really it just takes time to search through your site and edit every link. Fortunately, you don't have to change the way you FTP, as FTP is a separate protocol that works exactly the same with https. I also haven't had to make any changes to WeatherCat settings or preferences.
This is a weekend project that will take some time, but most of your sites will be much less complicated than mine because most of you are only loading weather data. If you've been thinking about it, I encourage you take the plunge. Your life will get better, your neighbors will be nicer to you, your dog will not bite you, Edouard will let you borrow his Buick, and you will like tracking the weather more than you do now. Or not.
