85
votes
Accepted
What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
HTTPS does not just provide secrecy (of which you are doubting the value, though there are good reasons for it still) but also authenticity, which is always of value. Without it, a malicious access ...
43
votes
Accepted
What happens if you don't set cache-control header?
If there is no Cache-Control header and no Expires header, but there is a Last-Modified header (which most web servers send by default for static assets), most browsers will use heuristic freshness to ...
- 4,484
34
votes
What is the need of methods like GET and POST in the HTTP protocol?
Please note the question has changed/been clarified since this answer was first written. A further response to the latest iteration of the question is after the second horizontal rule
What is the ...
- 521
25
votes
What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
"nothing secret on the site"
...According to you. There migh be a perfectly fine reason someone wants a secure connection. It (partly) creates privacy:
My admin can see that I'm browsing some ...
- 6,806
24
votes
Accepted
HTTP Status Code: Response with 101 or 301?
The correct status code to use here is without a doubt 301 Moved Permanently.
101 Switching Protocols is an internal status code that a server generally uses to automatically negotiate certain types ...
- 16.2k
16
votes
Accepted
What is the purpose of GETting this external file?
It is used by Firefox when detecting whether it is using a captive portal.
A captive portal is a Web page that the user of a public-access network is obliged to view and interact with before access ...
- 8,511
13
votes
What is the need of methods like GET and POST in the HTTP protocol?
HTTP can be thought of as one specific case of generic principles of Remote Procedure Call: you tell the server what you want with some variable field in the request, the server responds accordingly. ...
- 266
12
votes
What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
You get HTTP/2 support, the new web standard designed to significantly improve website loading speeds.
Because browser makers have chosen to support HTTP/2 only over HTTPS, enabling HTTPS (on a ...
- 696
12
votes
How to avoid SSL warnings about certificate not for the current site when redirecting alternate domains?
Cloudflare is a free solution for redirecting your alternate domains with HTTPS support. Here are detailed instructions for setting it up:
Visit Cloudflare
Create an account and verify your email ...
- 99.2k
12
votes
HTTP Status Code: Response with 101 or 301?
No - 101 Switching Protocols is not appropriate for redirecting to HTTPS, as this status indicates that the current connection should be upgraded to the new protocol, whereas a redirect instructs the ...
- 221
10
votes
What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
(Parts taken from my answer to a similar question.)
HTTPS can achieve two things:
Authentication. Making sure that the visitor is communicating with the real domain owner.
Encryption. Making sure ...
- 21.8k
8
votes
Accepted
Forwarding a GoDaddy domain, but HTTPS requests are not forwarding
Godaddy's forwarding services have problems and shouldn't be used:
GoDaddy's 301 redirect/forwarding has some weird random middleman URL, kills link juice?
They don't support HTTPS
One way to solve ...
- 99.2k
7
votes
What is the need of methods like GET and POST in the HTTP protocol?
From my personal point-of-view as a developer, it can make creating API endpoints much easier. For instance if I write a controller that manages products on a website I can use the same URL to do ...
6
votes
Accepted
what is the meaning and use case of each URL encoding Reserved Characters
What does each of this characters mean in context of an URI?
Note that a URI consists of several different "contexts" or parts. eg. the scheme, host, URL-path, query string and fragment ...
- 43k
6
votes
What is the benefit of forcing a site to load over SSL (HTTPS)?
It prevents man in the middle attacks that make you think you are visiting your site but present a page that is actually from another and may attempt to get info from you. Since the data is encrypted, ...
- 4,639
6
votes
Accepted
Does changing from HTTPS to HTTP kill my backlinks?
Google will switch between https and http (and vice versa) without any noticeable link juice loss - as long as the links (apart from prefix) are identical.
However if you want to make sure that your ...
- 1,079
6
votes
Accepted
HTTP webpage is showing "Not Secure" in Chrome
This is a move to make the web more secure. Additionally, it protects all visitors to your site. The long-term solution is to implement SSL on your website(s), as all websites will eventually need to ...
- 1,254
6
votes
Accepted
Is a PHP POST using cURL from HTTPS site to HTTP endpoint encrypted securely?
Short answer: no, it is not encrypted.
The only thing that matters is the URL you are using to send content, what happened before is irrelevant.
If you are sending your content to an HTTP URL then ...
- 8,485
6
votes
What is the need of methods like GET and POST in the HTTP protocol?
What is the need of methods like GET and POST in the HTTP protocol?
It seems that you forgot the old days when HTTP servers were there just to serve files; not running script, CGI, or making dynamic ...
6
votes
Accepted
What headers used in request by google bot?
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL'] == 'no-cache') {
Also bear in mind that the Cache-Control HTTP request header (as with most request headers) are entirely optional, so may not be present as part of ...
- 43k
6
votes
Accepted
What browser is Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; SM-A202F) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.120 Mobile Safari/537.36?
Below is the syntax for the User Agent header:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (<system-information>) <platform> (<platform-details>) <extensions>
In your case we have.
Mozilla/5.0 (...
- 6,539
5
votes
Proper status code for language redirection (301, 302, … 307)?
For users either a 302 or 307 redirect is fine. The only practical difference between those and a 301 redirect is caching. Browsers cache a 301 redirect. If the user changes their browser language ...
- 99.2k
5
votes
Accepted
What benefits are there to having both HTTP and HTTPS protocols indexed by Google?
None. This is harmful for SEO, and is likely to result in duplicate content issues, split inbound link profiles, incompatibility with secure iframes, and other such unpleasantness.
The reason you see ...
- 5,246
5
votes
Accepted
HTTP2 is enabled and working, but PHP $_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'] still says "HTTP/1.1"
This has to do with how Cloudflare connects to servers. Although it does serve the client via HTTP2 (or HTTP3), it still connects to the server itself via HTTP1.1.
Cloudflare only uses HTTP/1.x ...
- 545
5
votes
Accepted
Redirecting bare domain to www doesn't when specifying http/https scheme
Namecheap does not offer HTTPS for redirects. It would be better to implement the redirect at your hosting company so that they can do HTTPS for the redirect. This page has instructions about half ...
- 99.2k
5
votes
Can a use a masked redirect from an alternate domain using the HTTPS of the main domain?
No. Not the way you describe it. Masking is marketing speak for embedding a site within another site (using an iframe), and its a questionable practice at best. The takeaway point is that the http ...
- 8,213
4
votes
Accepted
How does this link redirect?
The initial request for http://www.esdc.gc.ca/en/cpp/post_retirement/eligibility.page returns a page that contains the following...
<script>
window.location.replace("/cgi-bin/op-so/err/404-fra....
4
votes
What is the purpose of GETting this external file?
Captive portals are generally found at public wi-fi hot-sports,
Starbucks, Airports.
Firefox uses this to detect if it's trapped in a
captive portal (success.txt not found) or can really ...
- 245
4
votes
HTML and SEO - Relative Links and Absolute Links
It's slightly more clear now.
Firstly, you need to set your preferred URL.
Example:
Let's say your home page preferred URL is: https://www.example.com
Then have all other versions of your URL to ...
- 3,173
4
votes
When converting a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS, do all hard-coded HTTP references need to be updated?
There are few steps to convert WordPress site to HTTPS.
Take a full backup of your DB and website files.
In WP admin > Settings: Change to HTTPS under WordPress Address and Site Address.
.htaccess: ...
- 3,173
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible