HTTPS - What is it and why is it important?

What is HTTP?

When you visit a website or type in the address of a site you may have noticed that the address is prefixed by “HTTP”, i.e. “http://www.writeupp.com”.

HTTP or “HyperText Transfer Protocol” is a fundamental element of the world wide web. It allows your web browser (i.e. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Internet Explorer) to communicate with the server where any given website is hosted. Responses can be sent and received between the client (yourself) and the server, allowing you to access different websites.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS or “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure” is formed by layering the Hypertext Transfer Protocol over another secure protocol, known as “SSL/TLS” (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security). This adds an extra level of security and allows authentication of the website you are visiting. Web addresses starting with HTTPS are using the secure HTTPS protocol.

Sites that are using the HTTPS protocol are often indicated by a lock icon in the address bar, as shown below:

Who uses HTTPS?

HTTPS has historically been used for payment transactions and e-mail, so you may have already been using it for applications such as PayPal or Online Banking.

More recently HTTPS has been adopted by cloud-application providers (like WriteUpp) to:

Protect Page Authenticity
Secure Your Account
Encrypt Communication

What are the benefits of HTTPS?

HTTPS provides “bidirectional encryption” of communications between the browser running on your device and the server running WriteUpp. In doing this it prevents malicious attempts to intercept or read data being passed between the two.

Do I need to do anything to use HTTPS?

No, you do not need to do anything. WriteUpp will automatically use the HTTPS protocol to communicate with the server, so you should see this when you log in.

Updated on: 07/11/2022