Bulletproof : Improve your customer experience using HTTPS and speed with Bulletproof and AWS

With the ever-increasing popularity of online shopping, more people than ever doing their daily shopping and other tasks online. Add to this the fact that the planet now has over 7 billion mobile phones, which means there are more devices than people on Earth, and it's clear that mobile is becoming the preferred platform for performing daily tasks such as paying bills, online banking and more.

This means that it couldn't be more important to make sure your customer's experience is the fastest and most secure it can be.

Security and privacy is currently a hot topic. Google's browser, Chrome, now labels sites that are not being served over HTTPS as 'not secure' in the address bar, meaning that it is more important than ever to ensure you are running your site over HTTPS.

Securing your site

With AWS it is easy and free to ensure you are running your site securely. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) allows you to generate certificates and keep them stored in a safe location with automatic renewal and deployment, so you don't have to remember to do this every year. DNS validation is the best way to use ACM and saves you from having to review the email inbox of the domain administrator to approve a new certificate. It becomes even simpler when you are hosting your DNS on Amazon Route 53 as ACM can create the required resource records directly in your Route 53 configuration.

Here's a step by step guide.

ACM supports a number of AWS services out-of-the-box. You can easily add your shiny new free certificate to your Application Load Balancer or Cloudfront distribution.

After you've installed your certificate you should ensure that you are redirecting all insecure traffic to HTTPS. Both Cloudfront and ALB make this easy.

Improving site speed

While mobile devices have revolutionized consumer behaviour one limitation is their often underperforming, over congested carrier networks. This can lead to a poor experience for your user. To help mitigate this and improve your customers' experience you need to ensure your site is optimised for use on these lower quality networks.

Amazon Cloudfront can cache content closer to the user with over 160 Points of Presence and also help you serve out static content from an Amazon S3 Bucket instead of putting extra strain on your application server, leaving your application server to do what it does best - run the application, not serving out static content.

Amazon Cloudfront can also compress objects and utilise HTTP/2 protocol to use the least amount of bandwidth possible to ensure your site's content gets to the user as fast as possible.

Conclusion

With Bulletproof and AWS, your site can be fast and secure with very little effort. This keeps your existing customers satisfied and new customers heading your way while allowing you to focus on your business instead of worrying about the technical details. Reach out today to see how we can help.