Encryption is now rolling out across every website and blog under the WordPress umbrella, turning HTTP to HTTPS and those blank pages on the left side of the URL to secured green locks.
Basically, what all this means for the users is that they'll be safe from security breaches, intruders, prying eyes, cookie theft and anything else along those lines. That's not all they're getting out of the whole deal, though, as Google loves websites with HTTPS. In other words, their blogs and websites will have greater visibility and better ranking in the search engine.
Now, about how to get in on the security action, all the users have to do is nothing. Yep, everyone gets an SSL certificate without having to activate or sign up for anything.
"For you, the users, that means you'll see secure encryption automatically deployed on every new site within minutes. We are closing the door to un-encrypted web traffic (HTTP) at every opportunity," Barry Abrahamson, CTO of WordPress, says.
For the record, WordPress subdomains - websites with the ".wordpress.com" appendage - already have encryption support since 2014, but it's about time for the others to be included in the mix.
Abrahamson also notes that the publishing platform was able to implement encryption on a massive scale thanks to "an efficient and automated way to provide SSL certificates for a large number of domains" from the Let's Encrypt project.
As mentioned earlier, a green lock icon on the left side of the address bar and an "https://" URL are indicators that the website is secured and has an SSL certificate.
On an interesting note, it has been determined that 25 percent of the websites around the globe is powered by WordPress back in November last year, so this development will provide security to a huge portion of the websites on the Internet.
Photo: Andrew Abogado | Flickr
