It has always been beneficial to have any e-commerce website running on HTTPS hosting - in simple terms, the 'S' stands for secure, meaning any communication between your website and the visitor is encrypted.
When taking card payments or personal details, this significantly reduces the chances of the customers data being read maliciously.
In September of 2016, Google announced that their web browser, Google Chrome, would soon be implementing a warning on any website that was not secure, even when the website was not taking personal details or online payments:
https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html
The first stage of this update to Google Chrome was released in January 2017, where any non-secure HTTPS website is marked in the browser address bar with an exclamation mark. In time, this will change to be a word warning stating 'Not Secure'. In contract, HTTPS websites are labelled with a bright green 'Secure' message and a padlock icon.
Clearly, for anyone visiting your website, seeing a 'Not Secure' message may be enough to put them off and see them leave your website and choose to go somewhere else, potentially losing you business.
In order to ensure that none of our clients are affected by this change, we are now including HTTPS hosting as a standard provision across all of our websites, old and new. We are also not charging any extra for this service, we will enable and force HTTPS on every website, so visitors and potential customers will not be put off by any warnings.
Like supporting mobile website design on all websites from the launch of our company, beating Google's changes to search results which now penalise non-mobile friendly websites, we feel it is a critical and important step to ensure that we also support and provide HTTPS hosting to all clients before Google begins to increase the weighting of HTTPS websites in search results and in their browser.
As well as adding this important feature, we are also making further changes to our hosting to support the most modern and efficient technologies, further improving the speed that your website loads whilst ensuring security is as high as possible.
Both aspects above are just two of the ways that we provide more than just your website with our services!