Better late than never, Tumblr has rolled out HTTPS across its entire site.
In a brief post on Tumblr’s engineering page, the company said all Tumblr sites will now have the web encryption setting enabled by default, though it admitted the move was “long-overdue.”
Tumblr, which like TechCrunch is owned by Verizon, has 464 million users and at the time of writing ranks in at 44 of the top 100 sites based on Alexa traffic data. Until the HTTPS switchover, it was the highest ranked site that didn’t enable HTTPS across its entire site.
The rollout followed an earlier effort to switch the site over to HTTPS in 2017, but required users to enable the feature.
HTTPS — the “s” stands for “secure” — ensures the website or app you’re using is encrypted, ensuring nobody can intercept and steal your data or modify the website. Millions of websites have embraced the web encryption standard in recent years amid concerns about privacy, tracking and surveillance.