Google rolling out HTTPS cached website pages for HTTPS-enabled sites

HTTPS has become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule, in recent years. And in an effort to usher in the encrypted and more-secure communication protocol, Google announced last month that it would begin prioritizing HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing the web. Unsurprisingly, Google is also slowly-but-surely making sure all of its own web properties use HTTPS over standard HTTP. Google’s cached pages available on the search site are now part of the club…

In case you weren’t already aware, Google allows you to view a cached version of pretty much any page on the web. As long as the page has been indexed by Google at one point or another, you should be able to search for it, click a little drop-down arrow next to its result, and clicked “Cached” to view a copy of the page as most recently seen by Google. It can be a nifty feature, especially if a site goes down and there’s some critical piece of information that you need. I’ve also used it many times for viewing a recent cached version of a page when I’ve suspected that something notable has changed on the page.

For example, you can see a cached version of 9to5Google here.

Now, those pages are going HTTPS for sites that use HTTPS. While a quick search for 9to5Google on the company’s search engine doesn’t show an HTTPS-enabled cached page quite yet, the vast majority of pages I’ve tried—including Android.com, Yahoo.com, and several others) are working as they should. Google’s Gary Illyes said that the feature was rolled out on Monday (via Search Engine Roundtable), but most sites didn’t seem to be showing in HTTPS until just the last 24 hours.

@rustybrick yup, i finished rolling that out on Monday

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) January 22, 2016