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Why HTTPS Makes A Difference

Milecia on March 26, 2019

Almost every website is using HTTPS now. If it's not, Google flags it with a nasty looking "not secure" symbol in the left corner. There are a bunc...
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fluffy

One downside that people keep on overlooking: HTTPS everywhere makes for a bad experience for caching proxy servers, which are absolutely necessary for folks with limited Internet access in various parts of the world. Obviously you do want to provide HTTPS everywhere you can, but unless the site is handling user logins or private data, at least provide the option of still accessing via HTTP.

Obviously HTTPS should be the preferred transport, but not everything needs it to be mandatory.

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Ian Knighton

One thing worth noting, if you use a service like CloudFlare, they will provide you an SSL certificate.

I use Let's Encrypt in a lot of places, but my personal site uses the CloudFlare certificate. It's very straight forward and only requires some DNS changes.

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Ben Sinclair

HTTPS actually slightly slows down a website because the user and the server have to exchange those keys using the certificates before any real data is transferred.

That sounds logical, but it's not what happens in real world conditions - try httpvshttps.com/ for a demonstration. There's a good write-up of this on Troy Hunt's blog.

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Dinesh Rathee

LetsEncrypt have revoked around 3 million certs last night due to a bug that they found. Are you impacted by this, Check out ?

DevTo
[+] dev.to/dineshrathee12/letsencrypt-...

GitHub
[+] github.com/dineshrathee12/Let-s-En...

LetsEncryptCommunity
[+] community.letsencrypt.org/t/letsen...

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Rohov Dmytro

I believe Netlify also provides a free https whish is incredibly handy.

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David J Eddy

Excellent article Milecia. For additional reading check out my articles as well. I did a couple awhile back comparing the speed between HTTP and HTTPS + HTTP/2.

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Islam Sayed

Hello!
Thank you for the information. I talked about your article in a LinkedIn post here:
linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ac...

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Milecia

Thanks for sharing Islam!