Half of Plymouth businesses suffer drop in traffic as Google “punishes” website security 

Up to half of all businesses in Plymouth are likely to have seen a big drop in website traffic, after Google started labelling their websites as “not secure”.

The internet giant made a major change to its Chrome browser on July 24th, according to local IT expert Your Martin Limburn at Limbtec Limited.

“Without getting techy, if your website isn’t encrypted, Chrome now warns visitors to be careful,” explained Martin.

“And many of them will choose not to visit your website, wrongly thinking it will infect their computer with something.

“Problem is, Chrome is the number one browser used in the UK. That’s a lot of traffic to risk.”

You can tell if a website is encrypted by the letters that appear before www, in the bar at the top, when you’re looking at a site.

If it says https:// then the site IS encrypted.

But if there’s no s – it’s just http:// – then the site is NOT encrypted, and will trigger the Chrome warning.

This is part of a major campaign by Google that’s been underway for a number of years.

It wants all websites to be encrypted, to protect data transferred between sites and our computers.

Martin added: “The good news is that fixing this can be done easy and cheaply. It’s one of those things that Plymouth businesses can get done for them, and then forget about.”