SSL everywhere
By on January 31, 2014
On Wednesday night we switched this website to a brand new server. If you look at the URL bar, you’ll see https at the beginning of the URL. That extra s after “http” means you’re browsing over an encrypted and secure connection. We’re now serving 100% of our web traffic over a secure, SSL connection. We have always protected the e-commerce portions of our website, but we’re excited to roll out SSL everywhere. This doesn’t yet include our theme demo sites, but we’ll be moving those over as well.
What is SSL and why does it matter?
An SSL connection encrypts all the data that is passed between your browser and our web server. This prevents someone from intercepting those communications. SSL is like two people talking in a private room. Unencrypted connections of the http variety are like talking in a crowded bar, where anyone on the network can listen in. As the web matures, and attacks get more sophisticated, SSL is becoming more and more important.
We take security seriously at The Theme Foundry and we are excited to offer this extra layer of privacy and security to our customers and visitors. We are constantly working hard to improve security, both in our theme products and our website.
New infrastructure
We’ve also invested time overhauling our infrastructure. Implementing SSL usually slows down your site. An SSL connection takes longer to establish because the browser and the server need to exchange additional information in order to secure the communications. We’ve always been proud of having a fast website, and wanted to preserve the site’s excellent performance. To help mitigate this performance hit, we implemented Nginx with SPDY 3.1, which speeds up HTTPS requests and makes up for the time lost with the initial SSL connection.
More details coming soon
You may not notice much of a difference with the site, but you should know it’s now much more secure and performant. We put the same care and effort into our website as we do our themes.
For the technical minded, we’ll be diving into some of the details around setting up our new infrastructure over the coming weeks.
