Google dropped another bombshell on the SEO and web community recently, announcing that web pages with forms that are not secure will sport a “not secure” tag from Chrome version 62 onwards. It is another step in Google pushing the entire internet to switch to HTTPS as soon as possible to increase security. However, there is a silver lining with going HTTPS.

First of all, moving over to HTTPS, in general, is a good idea. Not only is your site and your customer information secure from eavesdropping, but you also get to exploit that security as a competitive advantage over sites still on HTTP. Also, Google made HTTPS a ranking signal, which means your site should get a ranking boost from the migration.

The silver lining is that as soon as you implement HTTPS, Googlebot will crawl your entire site again. Ask any SEO, and they would love the opportunity to get an entire site re-examined by Google. Now you can implement any improvements you need and then use the HTTPS migration to get the entire site crawled again.

Consider the following steps:

Audit – First audit the entire site. Please note that this process can take weeks for larger sites.

Implement – Hire a development team to implement the recommendation from the audit as soon as possible.

Test – Run through the entire website and all permutations of your process and look for any issues that are a result of the audit recommendations. Fix any new issues.

Migrate – When you finish implementation and testing, migrate to HTTPS and watch as your entire website is crawled again.