Increase Conversions by Fixing HTTPS Errors
Posted by Mark C in 
Imagine an elderly grandmother – we’ll call her Grandma Moz. She’s about to make her very first online purchase. She’s used a computer before, but feels some anxiety giving out her personal information over the internet. Then, just when she’s about ready to enter her credit card number, the following message pops up:
What does Grandma Moz do? If she is like 30% of most internet users, she runs and hides her credit card back into her wallet never to be seen again. And the unsuspecting website loses the sale.
The 30% is not a statistic based on a large data set, but rather the experience of an actual client website I work with that recently installed HTTPS on its checkout pages. Instead of seeing an increase in conversions, as would be expected, sales actually dropped after installing HTTPS. A brief investigation showed the culprit to be error messages coming from a single browser – Internet Explorer 8. FIxing the problem became an adventure.
What is an HTTPS Error?
HTTPS is a secure way for browsers to communicate directly with servers using encryption. Without going into the technical details (which I am not an expert on) HTTPS causes your browser’s address bar to turn green or blue on sites like PayPal and SEOmoz’s checkout pages. In Microsoft’s IE8, the overly scary security warning pops up if it detects any HTTPS errors – meaning that some part of the page has been called from a non-secure source.
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