Everyone on the Internet started talking about SSL certificates, and increasingly over the past periods. what is the reason for this fuss!!?
Given that
website owners rely relatively on free visits from Google search engine, Google and its algorithms are constantly changing. Google recently classified websites without SSL certificates as not secure, and this is one of the latest measures Google has taken to combat fraudulent websites and pages.
There is a good chance that you have already met one of these alert messages. Or, even worse, users have contacted you saying that your
website or online store is not secure according to Google search results. As a website owner, you never wish to fall into this problem, as you may lose most of your organic search engine visits.
What does an SSL certificate do? What are its main benefits for a website?
From a business perspective, there is no need to go into many technical details, but you will need to know how an
SSL certificate affects your website. Here is a great video tutorial:
As you can now imagine, an SSL certificate is your way - as a web store owner to show your users security and encrypt data. Users will also notice a different visual indication of a valid SSL certificate in the browser, such as a lock icon, a green bar, etc., depending on which certificate you are using.
So what are the main benefits of implementing an SSL certificate on your website?
Now that you have an idea of how SSL certificates work, it's time to find out how you can benefit from them for your website or online store.
1- Encrypted communications and data
Do users have to be logged in to access pages on your website? Does your website have to handle sensitive information, such as credit cards, insurance numbers, etc.? Well, without an SSL certificate, which encrypts all communications back and forth, these types of data can be “hacked” by a hacker quite easily because it would be plain text.
2- Performance and HTTP/2
The world is moving to the newer version of the HTTP protocol called HTTP/2 because, on top of many improvements, it has higher performance (we are talking about 50-70% better performance of sites over HTTP/1.1). How does this relate to SSL certificates? Well if you want to take advantage of HTTP/2, you will be required to run your website on HTTPS.
3- Search engine optimization - SEO
In 2014, Google started considering HTTPS as one of the ranking factors. So a lot of website owners started switching from HTTP to HTTPS because they didn't want to be penalized by the search engine. By analyzing a million search results, Backlink founder Brian Dean found that HTTPS, in fact, correlates with a higher Google first page rank:
4- Building trust
Besides the other advantages mentioned above, an SSL certificate helps you in one of the main aspects as it builds trust between you and the users. It shows them that they are interacting with a secure website, where for example their credit card information is taken care of in a secure and encrypted manner. Of course, you don't need us to tell you how important trust is at work.
You'll need to have an SSL certificate, if...
- You have an online store. If not,
let’s start building one!
- You have paid
memberships on your website
- Have any type of transaction site (internet banking, financial account management, wire transfers, and the like)
- Your website requires users to login
- Your website contains forms that handle personal data, credit card information, or any other sensitive data from your users
- Your website allows users to chat on the website
This guide aims to provide you with tools and information to understand the importance of moving your website or store towards a safer future. Leaving users' data unprotected was not the right thing to do and certainly not today, with an abundant list of options to choose from.
and you want to bring it online, you focus on growing your business and let us handle all technical details. With dooklik you get a guaranteed delivery timeline and price upfront.