The other day I was reading Tom Critchlow’s post over on the Google analytics blog and after thinking about this a little farther I realized that it goes much farther then just the analytics tracking code. To get everybody caught up here I’m talking about HTTPS security issues with a website, which will effect your results with users of internet explorer the most, with the seemingly over reactive security warnings. I’m sure if you have ever used internet explorer you have seen the pop ups, I know I have many times, even when going to check my email. If you run an eccommerce site this could be disastrous, if your would be customer sees security warnings just before entering their credit card info, they will probably change their mind about making the purchase and likely go to a competitors site to make the purchase. When considering this think about how many sales you are losing every year due to one simple issue that you could probably fix within an hour. While fixing the problem may be simple finding it may prove to be quite a difficult task, but fortunately there are some tools that will help to complete the task.
Alright so of course the first thing you’ll want to do is determine that you have a problem to begin with, and the easiest way to do that is browsing your website with internet explorer, making sure to get all your HTTPS pages. Now comes the fun part, if you find that you have an error somewhere in your page you now have the task of finding it.
This is where the handy tools come in, you can set your browser over to httpwatch, they offer a free basic edition of there software, which should be enough if you only need to do a small site. Once you get it setup you can set it to load up your page, and then just watch and see which part of the page isn’t HTTPS compliant.
Now you should be well on your your to finding your problem but how do you go about fixing them? I will cover a few of the most common problems here, keep in mind that there are many others that could occur. Additionally if you find you are having a problem with your analytics tracking code you could refer to Tom’s blog post for more information on that.
Beyond the tracking code that you probably copy and paste onto your pages, another common error seems to come from images. The best way to overcome this, is when you are linking to images try to just use relative paths, rather than using absolute paths such as: http://example.com/images/picture.jpg If your site is using absolute paths such as the example above you should consider changing that so it looks something like: //example.com/images/picture.jpg
If you have already gone through the basic things that appear right in the source code of the page in question and still don’t see anything it’s time to digg a little bit deeper into your files. In particular your CSS and JavaScript files, these could contain links to images or other files that are not compliant with HTTPS. When going through these you should use the some basic methods as above, for linking to other files.
Hopefully this post will help some of you out there to fix up your site and start increasing conversions, particularly from IE users. As I mentioned above this doesn’t cover 100% of the problems that you may run into, it does cover the most common errors that are found.