As those of you who are self-hosting your websites will probably know, beginning this month (July) with the release of Chrome 68, Google Chrome will start marking all HTTP sites as “not secure”:
Depending on your traffic, this may or may not be an issue. Still, many of you will upgrade your hosting with an additional security measure called a Security Socket Layer–or SSL. As the rather technical name suggests, what this does is make sure that the communication between your server and a visitor is secure. As far as web users are concerned, the only difference is that the prefix to their website address will now be HTTPS instead of HTTP, the extra S indicating this is now a Secure server.
Some hosts already provide this free of charge, while others will charge for the upgrade. But there is a snag: the moment you make the move to HTTPS, all your Share Counts for your content disappear! Social networks like Facebook and Pinterest think that your links/URLs have changed, which is why your older share count numbers are lost.
The good news is that Shareaholic can recover them for you with its proprietary Share Count Recovery technology with a click of a button, at least if you’re using the PRO edition. Even better, it doesn’t even matter if you were using Shareaholic before your move! Shareaholic claims its technology works for any website and can recover the lost counts at any time:
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Thanks as always Nicholas for keeping us all up to date. Thankfully, I added my SSL over a year ago on the advice of my webhost. Sadly, they weren’t as gracious as to offer me it for free LOL. I wasn’t aware of losing shares, but I suppose that’s water under the bridge now, lol. Although, do remember, my webhost had to install it for me and it took awhile, and I may seem to remember that I was told how they’d do it wouldn’t disrupt anything? 🙂
Yes, it can be a bit disruptive if not done properly. Thank you for sharing that, Debby!
Pleasure Nicholas 🙂
Good tips for self-hosters, Nicholas. 🙂
best wishes, Pete.
Thank you, Pete! It can all be overwhelming, so I’m trying to be sensible about these things 🙂
Nicholas, Thankfully us creative types can always count on you to steer us in the pragmatic direction. Everything seems to be getting more difficult. We have to fight for every reader we reach out to. Thank you for sharing. I am humbled by your attention to detail.
That’s so kind of you; thank you!!