ISPreview.co.uk Site Status Update – HTTP to HTTPS Secure

Please accept our apologies if the website was redirecting in an unusual way for 2-3 hours this afternoon. The reason for that is because after a lot of preparation work we’ve made the subtle but important move from an unencrypted (HTTP) to an encrypted / secure (HTTPS) website.

Personally I’m not a huge fan of saying that HTTPS is equal to a “secure” site because encrypting all the communications between your browser and the website doesn’t stop all sorts of other potential attack vectors or vulnerabilities. Similarly it’s largely unnecessary on a news and information website like ISPreview.co.uk as we don’t handle any financial transactions etc.

On the other hand Google and others have for a long time been pushing websites to adopt HTTPS and over the past year a number of major browsers have also started throwing up irritating security warnings on login / password forms. In that sense I’ve been planning to shift to HTTPS since the end of last year and after getting other projects out of the way I’m pleased to report that this has now been completed.

Generally readers shouldn’t notice much difference, although you may spot a nice padlock icon next to your browser’s address bar for our site and of course the URL will start HTTPS instead of HTTP. Some older articles or forum pages with embedded links to HTTP images and videos may show a minor warning due to mixed content (calling http links inside an https page will do that) but this is nothing to worry about.

Finally, we’d also ask that any forum members with a signature image that links to a remote HTTP site could kindly update that to an HTTPS link (usually you just swap the two around and it’ll be fine, unless the remote server doesn’t yet support HTTPS).