In the first week of January, 2017, HTTPS reached a memorable accomplishment – 50 percent of page loads used HTTPS, not HTTP. It’s the very first time in history.
Sarah Grain, director of communications at ‘Let’s Encrypt’ told that “For the first time, the running average crested the 50 percent HTTPS page load mark.We see that as solid progress when it comes to making the entire internet more secure. We are really excited about this two-week running average that clearly demonstrates much more stability in the platform and security online”.
So what is HTTPS and why it is so important? If HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, then HTTPS is a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Basically, when you use your web browser to visit any website, website provides the web browser with hypertext protocol and two sides communicate this way. While HTTP is a regular hypertext transfer protocol that was used long time ago and is still in use, HTTPS is a safer way to transfer the protocol. So we are talking about the security of your data.
Data sent from website to your web browser or vice versa can be hacked by the middle man in the process. If the website has HTTPS installed, data is encrypted and completely secure. It’s an essential feature for websites that interacts with sensitive data, such as users’ credit card info and other private data.
Even though 50 percent of Internet traffic last two weeks loaded using HTTPS, it’s far away from half of active websites to use HTTPS. Security researcher Troy Hunt commented: “This rate of growth is quite spectacular. Most sites are now HTTPS because… a huge portion of traffic is served from a small number of big sites. Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc. all do all their things over HTTPS and that keeps that number quite high”. He also noted that only 18.4% of top million websites on Alexa ranking use HTTPS.
