Bing Ads Recommends Securing Your Web Sites With https
On July 9th, Bing Ads wrote on their blog that they strongly recommend all websites obtain an SSL certificate and have their sites secured using SSL.
Bing went on to say “Ensuring customer privacy is critical to your business and to ours. To protect your customers’ information and assure them your website is secure when they see your ad, Bing Ads strongly recommends you update your URLs to use the HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP. Because of the security and performance benefits associated with its use, HTTPS has become the new standard protocol used on the web (as opposed to the original HTTP).”
There are two main reasons Bing is making this recommendation now:
- “Starting this month, the web browser Google Chrome will begin marking all Opens in new window HTTP pages as “Not secure.” So if your website is still an HTTP URL instead of HTTPS, Chrome users who click on your ads will see your URL marked as “Not secure” in the address bar.”
- Because of the security and performance benefits associated with its use, HTTPS has become the new standard (as opposed to the original HTTP).
How do you check if your site supports HTTPS?
Open your website in a Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge:
If you see a green lock icon to the left of the URL, then your site supports HTTPS (for Edge, this lock may be transparent instead of green).
If the lock does not appear, try re-entering your website URL with “https://” instead of “http://”.
If the page doesn’t load, then your site does not support HTTPS.
If your site is not secure (https) contact your hosting company. Once your site is secure, make sure you update your Bing and Google Ads, so that they reflect the new URL.