AGC Website Moved to HTTPS

The Alresford Golf Club website is now protected with HTTPS – you will not see any significant difference apart from seeing a ‘padlock’ symbol or a green ‘https’ in your browser

HTTPS or Secure HTTP is an encryption method that secures the connection between users’ browser and the website server. This makes it very much harder for hackers to eavesdrop on the connection.

The primary motivation for doing this is that recent changes to popular browsers mean any page on a website that is non-HTTPS and has a password form (or credit card field) will be labelled as “Not secure” in the location bar. This may have confused AGC members who sign in to the Members’ Area if they interpreted the message to indicate that our website was compromised. They could also interpret the message to mean that our site has some underlying security issue other than being non-HTTPS.

Although no personal or financial information is stored or accessible on the AGC website, I felt it important to implement this. Google are also starting to rank websites using HTTPS higher in web searches than those not.

One casualty of this is the BBC Weather “Widget” previously visible in the right sidebar or below the main content. This was not available in a secure version and prevented our home page identifying as secure. I have replaced it with a link to the BBC website weather page for AGC.

Ron