Securing your website

If you take look at the URL bar at the top of this page, you will see that there is a little padlock at the begninning of it indicating that this page is secure. Northern Village has taken the step to make sure that all of its websites, and all future websites are secure. It is just a part of the service that we provide. This is in addition to making sure that a site is accessible, and that it works on different screen sizes and all major browsers. 

Why is it important?

Connection secureAt one time, secure websites were used for financial transactions or the transfer to sensitive material, but there are now good reasons for all websites to be a secure site.  These include:

  • Secure webpages load faster
  • Google uses website security in its ranking algorithm (Bing, Yahoo and Duck Duck Go do not use it)
  • Avoid having insecure warnings shown on Chrome
  • Visitors to your site are given confidence their privacy is protected.

Perhaps the best part of this is that providing security is free.

How we do it

Northern Village provides encryption for all its websites because of an initiative for the community called Let's Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. It is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). Like the internet itself, it is beyond the control of one organization.

We give people the digital certificates they need in order to enable HTTPS (SSL/TLS) for websites, for free, in the most user-friendly way we can. We do this because we want to create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.

See a description on how it works.

Maintaining security on your website

There are a couple of things that you do need to watch out for when using a secure site. You need to be aware that the resources you have on your page are also secure. Perhaps the biggest source of insecure items is the management of images. If you copy and image from another site, or even an image within your own site, it may very well be copied as an unsecure image. For both of these cases, it is best to upload the image to the page and show it from there.

Another source of insecure items is the use of embed codes for embedding forms, video or other applications. For the most part these services are secure, however, there are ones that are not. Often you can change http to https in the URL, however if that does not work, then you may consider using an alternate service.

If you do have any questions about security, please do not hesitate to contact us.