Site Audit: The New HTTPS Check
Because website security is becoming an increasingly important ranking factor for Google, we’re introducing a new addition to SEMrush’s Site Audit tool – the HTTPS Encryption Check for your website’s homepage.
What is HTTPS?
HTTPS is the secure version of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and is mostly used for encrypting data, thus protecting important or confidential user information.
What makes HTTPS important in terms of SEO?
Apart from the fact that visitors place more trust in websites that use it, HTTPS is also an important ranking factor for Google’s search result algorithms. In other words, websites that don’t support a secure HTTPS connection risk ending up lower in search results, and that’s something you definitely want to avoid as an SEO practitioner.
How do I know if my website uses HTTPS?
Lately, the importance of using HTTPS has increased, that’s why we’re introducing the new HTTPS Check to our Site Audit tool. Currently, Site Audit only checks if the homepage of your website uses HTTPS encryption and displays the result as a ‘Warning’-level issue. You can find this check in either the 'Issues' tab or the 'Page Report' for your website's homepage.
Since this is the first time we're introducing a check of this kind to Site Audit, we would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on how you would like us to further develop it. Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions by dropping us a line at site-audit-feedback@semrush.com ! Thank you for helping us make SEMrush better!