Question

I was asked this question not too long ago, and didn’t have a good answer…

Is there a good reason why a site that has an SSL certificate wouldn’t use https:// for their entire site rather than http://

Are there SEO issues? Performance overhead for the server?

Just in case it matters, we use LAMP stacks.

Thanks!

Answer 1

A few reasons:

• Generating SSL content takes some extra work so performance of a busy site could be an issue
• Most (all?) browsers stop sending referrer info with requests to tracking users through your site could be more challenging
• You might have to be more deliberate in how you serve pages to get browsers to cache them properly
• If the page is SSL, all content loaded on the page should be SSL, too, to avoid mixed-content warnings in the browser; serving dependencies like scripts, images, etc. under SSL is not always convenient

Note, however, that a lot of sites do do this. For example, several of the banks I use are always https, even for the parts that don’t require it.