Our website maintenance period has finished! So what does this mean for you?

Our content is now being served over HTTPS and we thought we’d share some of the reasons behind the project.

The reasons for our move;

1. Privacy

By using HTTPS, internet service providers (ISPs) are not able to track the pages which our members are accessing. It means we protect the privacy of our members when accessing content that may disclose any information that may be used against them. It matches our core values. We believe that protecting you is good internet citizenship.

2. Security

Once on HTTPS, we prevent malicious third parties from inserting code into our site, or tracking what our visitors are doing.

3. SEO

It also gives us other benefits such as a potential increase in search results. For the reasons mentioned above Google has announced that it will favour https content. It is also helping us decipher traffic from secure and ‘unknown’ referrers.

4. Content authoring and integrity

By switching to HTTPS, browsers will ensure that the content displayed is actually published by the BLDSA. Without HTTPS someone between the browser and our website could maliciously display other content or alter our content.

When actually viewing the site, it just means there’s a little padlock in the address bar. Which seems daft for how much effort this takes, but it means your privacy is protected while using our site! Very few of our commercial competitors have invested in this for their sites, which is no bad reflection on them since this does take a lot of work, but it does show the value we put on your trust.

Best wishes,
British Long Distance Swimming Association