In response to an increase in breaches of user security, Google is doing what it can to promote cybersafety and secure connections. Google recently announced its decision to boost the page ranking of those sites and entities that maintain the safe, secure connection of HTTPS and has begun to make the largest updates since 2010.

For organizations and websites yearning to maximize their search engine optimization, the question is whether it's worth it to make the switch from HTTP to HTTPS. The answer?

"Yes, eventually and ultimately — but not yet, not at this point in time," said Steve Lee, a digital communications professor at Southern Methodist University and an executive at a digital communications agency in Dallas.

According to Garnett Gilchrest, vice president of applications and infrastructure at MultiView, HTTPS exists as the communication protocol for websites that send all their data through a secure sockets layer. SSL, in turn, is essentially a private tunnel of sorts between you and the website that encrypts everything that travels through it.

"Without SSL and HTTPS, all of your usernames, passwords and credit cards would be sent through the Internet in 'plain text,'" Gilchrest explains. "It's the online equivalent to painting your credit card number on your car and driving it around town."

This secure connection proves extremely important for some sites — such as online banks — because it is the only way to safeguard and protect what is typed into the browser.

“It helps ensure that the information passing between you — and your computer — and the server you are interacting with stays between you two," Oracle developer Derek Smith said regarding the purpose of HTTPS. "Furthermore, it makes sure that no outside parties can 'see' what information you are passing back and forth."

Google claims two reasons why all communication should always be secure — you want to protect the privacy of the visitors coming to your site and you want to protect your site as well. But the cons of shifting to HTTPS may outweigh the pros for businesses contemplating a switch at this point in time. While SSL and HTTPS ensure that ad tracking is from legitimate companies and secures traffic from prying eyes, there are disadvantages that counter the benefits.

Gilchrest details how expensive SSL connections are, in several different senses. Not only are there financial costs to consider when making the switch, but organizations must take into account the maintenance of the secured site, SSL port licenses for firewalls and load balancers on edge networks — which sit between your organization's network and the Internet.

Moreover, secure connections pose a high cost in terms of overhead. With Google's recent push to use SSL for all traffic, the workload of Web servers climbs considerably. Servers will be forced to devote a portion of their processing power to decrypting and encrypting every user comment, CSS sheet, picture and script, regardless of how sensitive the data may be.

"That equates to more servers needed for the same amount of user traffic," Gilchrest said. "For larger companies that use edge devices with SLL offloading capabilities, you are looking at expensive licensing increases as well."

With all this in mind, it's important to recognize that Google's recent approach at boosting secured sites' ranking only impacts an estimated 1 percent of global searches.

"If we go more than a year without Google boosting relevance even more, then companies could save thousands on SSL port licenses and infrastructure, waiting until the benefits become more tangible," Gilchrest said.

Given the relatively minor nature of the page-ranking boost, he sees little motivation for businesses to make the change to HTTPS now, but realizes that it serves as a sign of things to come, as the drive for HTTPS and relevance of secured sites increase over time. Lee agrees.

"In directly promoting HTTPS everywhere, Google's taken steps to fundamentally say, 'We don't care about the games of SEO, we care about the content ... but we're going to do this entire transition gently,'" Lee said. "Eventually going to a site that's all secure makes sense, but not yet."

In the end, site owners and administrators will have to contemplate the costs and decide when it makes the most sense to upgrade and transition to HTTPS. Lee urges organizations to ask themselves within the next three months, "What will happen to our site performance if we go all HTTPS?" and, again, to be willing and able to make the necessary changes to be prepared to go all HTTPS in the next six months to a year.