After reading about Let's Encrypt's issuance of numerous certificates with 'Paypal' in the name, I decided to go with the more expensive GoDaddy SSL option. Besides the hit to the wallet it wasn't too difficult to initiate. I placed a redirect of all traffic to my site to 'https' in .htaccess, and then I discovered that there was a great deal of work that I had to do over the next several days in order to securely display many of my pages by converting 'http://' references to 'https://'.
Unfortunately several NOAA and NWS sites haven't yet adopted SSL as per the federal mandate, so some pages that use iframes to display external NWS loops such as the HAniS satellite loops won't display. I've put a 'blocked' graphic up on those pages' menu links and placed an explanatory note on the pages themselves, but it's a nuisance, albeit hopefully a temporary one. I did manage to substitute animated-gif-based loops for a couple of the comprehensive satellite displays, but it's nowhere near as useful as the full regional set of loops. The Sea Surface Temperature loops are being deprecated in favor of a much more comprehensive set of graphics that will require quite a bit of time to analyze before setting up new loops.
I now display the green padlock on most of my pages, the exceptions being when 'http://' references are needed for the page in which case the 'circle-i' is displayed in the address bar. In all, I'm not sure the reward has been worth the effort in view of the non-interactive nature of my site where no user date at all is entered. But I do understand the reasons for the change, and that's why I did so.