Nearly 90 percent of government websites use https

According to the Open State Foundation, 88 percent of government websites use a secure https connection. That is a significant growth compared to an earlier percentage. The researched websites in healthcare and education also support https in most cases.

According to the organization, the implementation of https on websites of public organizations is moving in the right direction, with 88 percent of government sites now using it. At 70 percent, this is somewhat lower in education and care; the Open State Foundation therefore states that one in three healthcare and education websites are still not properly secured.

The websites in these last two sectors do show the strongest growth. An earlier count in December 2017 showed that only a third of government websites used https in education and 39 percent in healthcare in August 2017. In December 2016, only 44 percent of government websites were still using https, which is a year later. had already grown to 72 percent.

The Open State Foundation states that it has researched more than 30,000 domains in the healthcare, education and government sectors, analyzing the web points of the URLs. Multiple open source tools and an API from SSL Labs were used for this. An overview of the websites and the https usage has been published in the Pulse dashboard.

Incidentally, the Open State Foundation emphasizes that the indication that a website supports https does not mean that the website actually enforces this. “Only 61 percent of healthcare domains really enforce https,” the organization said.

The fact that government sites are the best when it comes to supporting https is probably related in part to the fact that it will become mandatory in the course of this year. State Secretary Knops informed the House of Representatives last year that this obligation will take effect somewhere ‘mid-2019’.