HTTPS/SSL sites ranking preference. Is that true?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Ranu Jain: Hi People,
  
  I have read that Google is now giving ranking preference to HTTPS/SSL sites. Is that true? Did anyone try it?
  
  Please have a look at the below reference links:
  
  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
  
  http://www.isglobalweb.com/blog/google-gives-preference-to-httpsssl-secure-sites/
• 
  Jim Munro: Hi Ranu Jain. I think general consensus is that Google has made claims that have not been borne out in practice or at least, no-one has come forward and offered reliable accounts of improvement. I am not an expert but I guess for an ecommerce site it might make sense to change every page to https on the grounds that the padlock inspires trust in customers but there's no justification for a blog to implement SSL.
  
  On the plus side, googlebot is very fast to reindex from http to https (one-three days for most pages) and there does not seem to be any harm done to the sites where we have done this.
• 
  Ranu Jain: Thanks Jim.
  
  I also read that Google said they are "starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal." Google did add it is "only a very lightweight signal" ;
  and that it only had an impact on "fewer than 1% of global queries.
  
  Also, the SSL certificate (both shared and private) slow down the loading speed of the website. This is because the ;
  connection has to be encrypted / decrypted on the server and on the client end.
• 
  Michiel Kikkert: With the SPDY protocol, https sites can actually be faster than standard http.
  And performance is also a ranking signal :-)