SSL Certificates

As you’re reading this, you should see a padlock icon next to this website’s URL in the top left corner of your computer’s browser. That signifies that our website is protected using SSL. If your website doesn’t have one, you could be putting your customers’ personal data at risk and will negatively affect your ranking on search engines like Google.

You may have noticed when browsing the internet that nearly every website has a padlock icon next to the URL and almost all URLs begin with HTTPS rather than just HTTP. This signifies that the website has an SSL certificate.

Sending information online while keeping it secure in transit (which is necessary for transmitting passwords and credit card data) is made possible using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). SSL encrypts the information, making it near-impossible to decipher, even if it is intercepted.

Without an SSL certificate, data is carried in plain text between web servers and browsers, which makes that information liable to being intercepted, stolen, or altered.

If someone was watching the connection between your device and a website, but the website had SSL enabled, they would see that you were on that site, but not what you were doing. For instance, they wouldn’t be able to monitor your password or credit card information when you entered it to pay for an item.

Email messages can also be secured while in transit using SSL encryption. Anyone able to intercept the email would be unable to read its contents since they would just see a random collection of numbers, characters, and symbols instead of the email’s actual contents because the contents are encrypted.

Absolutely. If your business has a website or uses email, which almost every business does, an SSL certificate is an absolute necessity.

Not only does implementing SSL encryption on your website protect your customers, but it also effects your ranking on search engines. Since 2018, Google (and other search engines) have been actively penalising the search rankings of websites without valid SSL certificates.

Implementing SSL encryption on your website will also have an impact on your search engine ranking in addition to protecting your clients. The rankings of websites lacking valid SSL certificates have been actively penalised by search engines for the past few years. It’s rare to ever see a non-SSL website on the first page of results for any search.

Additionally, Google Chrome will display warnings when a user is about to view an unsecured website. This warning itself is sufficient to deter many potential users.