SSL support (also known as “HTTPS” and “TLS” support) is now included in all our plans.

This change allows you to access map tiles over a secure connection, including custom styles. It’s most useful when you want to show maps on a page already served over HTTPS, where serving tiles over plain HTTP can trigger mixed content warnings from web browsers. It’s also useful in other circumstances, not least to provide a small amount of privacy to your customers. Using HTTPS requests prevents network monitoring of which map images your customers are viewing, for example when they are using public wifi hotspots.

Big thanks to everyone who gave feedback during the rollout of SSL tiles to OpenCycleMap and OpenStreetMap earlier this year. This large-scale real-world testing helped us to implement performance improvements and handle some rare edge cases. Thanks also to the Mozilla team for their SSL config generator, which we are using to generate up-to-date cipher suite lists.

Since the whole Internet is increasingly moving towards encryption by default, I’ve updated our documentation to use https:// URLs as standard.

Switching over to our SSL enabled tiles is straightforward - change the URLs from http:// to https:// in your code - nothing else is required! If you’re not yet using Thunderforest maps in your project, then you should sign up today.