“What’s SSL and do I need one?” As a website designing agency dealing with businesses of all sizes and shapes, this is one question that we often hear from business owners who are trying to establish an online presence.
If you are to keep aside SSL and its technicalities, the question boils down to this – do you want your customers to feel secure while transacting, or sharing information on your website? How you answer this question determines how you are going to answer do I need SSL question.
What is it for?
Secure Sockets Layer or SSL certificate provides you the secure encrypted communication between a browser and your website. SSL certificates are an essential electronic document of the data encryption process that makes internet transactions secure. When personal information like a credit card number or password is encrypted, it is transferred in a complicated code so no one can read it while in transit. When the information reaches its destination, it is put back into plain text.
Benefits
- It will encrypt the content of the website and help you to avoid eavesdropping, man-in-middle-attack, sniffing attacks and forging the contents of the communication
- It will authenticate your website or business and prove your identity as a reliable
- Your website will have the authenticity that notifies visitors about their information to be secured if they share with the website. They get assurance about website authenticity
- It offers static site seal that can be placed on any web page for assurance and customers can click on the seal to know the details of the installed SSL certificate
- Your website will be free from an injection of malicious ads, exploits, unwanted widgets, software replacement, and harm to web pages once you have SSL on your website
- Enabling secure search or https through SSL helps to boost your website’s ranking on search engines. You would be delighted to know that as per the latest updates on ranking signal factors, Google gives 5% of ranking priority, for a website having SSL certificate.
What information needs to be protected?
Any personal information (includes credit card information, username, passwords, and other sensitive information) your customers give you needs to be secured. If customers submit these through your website, you need to get a certificate. You might think that a password used only for making comments on your forum doesn’t need to be protected, but unfortunately many people use the same passwords for forums as they do bank accounts. Any information that could be potentially harmful if compromised should be protected, including simple passwords.
As stated earlier, do I need SSL for my website is a question of trust which boils down to two important questions- are you taking customer information through the website and whether you want your customers to feel secure while interacting through your website? Before you answer yes or no, don’t forget to consider the benefits you have on search engine ranking by having SSL certificate installed on your website or go for any website designing agency to install SSL certificate.
