Use Only a Secured Sacramento Real Estate Website with a SSL Certificate

If you have not yet secured your Sacramento real estate website by obtaining an SSL certificate (secure socket layer), you could be in trouble. Chrome announced big news yesterday. You have a secure Sacramento real estate website if your URL is an HTTPS. If it is not, your site is not secure. A secure website encrypts the connection between a user and the website. For example, although I do no commerce through my website, I do allow visitors to email me directly through the website. Their email address would be vulnerable if my site was not secure. However, it is secure.

Further, because Chrome has become the browser of choice lately — even for me, a die-hard Safari fan — it can write the rules. The old rules were Chrome would display secured websites by sporting a green icon in the URL. If the website was not secure, it would not clearly call this out. However, in October, when Chrome 70 releases, anybody with an unsecured website will be clearly evident. Chrome will penalize those sites. There will be a red icon on unsecured sites and it will blink.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson.

In fact, I noticed yesterday that my photographers’ website is not secure. It’s supposed to be, and it says the information is encrypted but the URL bar tells a different story. Which is important since I enter my credit card information on that site. I hounded that poor guy like no tomorrow to acknowledge and fix it.

If you don’t want to be left in the dust, you need to obtain an SSL certificate for your website and install it. GoDaddy sells a certificate for $60. They also have a program where they will renew it for $75 a year. My website company will renew it for me at $50 a year, so that’s a bit of a break.

One caveat, after installing the certificate, be sure to update Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools by verifying your new domain.

You can trust the Elizabeth Weintraub website to be a secure Sacramento real estate website. And of course, some of the best information on the internet about real estate comes from this veteran Sacramento Realtor, with more than 40 years in the business.