One day, all websites will be made this way

Ever since Google announced a few months ago that it will markedly favour websites which use HTTPS encryption, more and more companies have been responding to the new order. 
Given that Google’s search engine is preferred by around 75 per cent of web surfers, it would be folly to ignore the company’s suggestions.

Google has now provided an update on how its directive has been received by the masses of websites online.

“A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It’s happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome,” says Google on its blog.

The company, which will basically downgrade basic HTTP websites and even label them as “not secure”, says the number of websites switching to HTTPS has been increasing significantly.

“More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory,” it says.

Google has produced a “transparency report” which shows how many websites were loaded over HTTPS.

The search giant reports that the share of webpages loaded by Firefox using HTTPS has climbed from 40 per cent since last November to just under 50 per cent today.

Google’s HTTPS tracker shows that worldwide the percentage of pages loaded over HTTPS on Chrome on all platforms has surpassed 50 per cent, up from 40 percent in mid-2015. On Chrome OS the figure is 67 percent.

While there is an apparent increase in the total number of websites using HTTPS, Google’s decree has not been heeded by the majority of the “top 100” websites, according to the company’s own findings.

The top 100, says Google, account for 25 per cent of all internet traffic, and yet most of them do not use HTTPS by default.

As Google shows on this page of its transparency report, only 34 of the top 100 are what could be termed fully secure, in that they have HTTPS as default and have the latest configurations.