How I Learned to Love Redirects: Lessons from Rolling out CloudFront on top of a Static S3 Site

Sat, 16 Apr 2022 14:42:09 -0700

Today, I finally got around to migrating my website to use HTTPS and SSL - something that will go under-the-hood to nearly everyone, but is becoming more and more important to do as a foundational internet thing.

Here’s a blurb from Namecheap in response to the question “Do I need an SSL certificate?”

We’ll just say it: yes. Your website needs any SSL certificate If you’re asking for any personal information. But that’s not all there is to it. Search engines are cracking down on perceived ‘non-secure’ websites. Any websites without the SSL certificate will remain http while those with encryption will show https in users’ browsers. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers have began issuing warnings that non-https sites are insecure. Additionally, Google recently announced SSL is a ranking signal, so unless you have SSL your site will be harder to find, impacting on your traffic and revenue.

Route 53 on Conor McLaughlin

How I Learned to Love Redirects: Lessons from Rolling out CloudFront on top of a Static S3 Site