SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It’s an important protocol for securing and authenticating data on the Internet.

As of  2018 Google Chrome has started marking websites that don’t offer HTTPS connections as “not secure.” This with the added fact that the price for an SSL certificate has dropped significantly and their ease of use, making SSL certificate one of most cost effective ways to secure your website.

For those of you who don’t know what this is or where to get one, you found the right place. We’re going to define what an SSL/TLS certification is and how it can help your site.

What is an SSL Certificate?

SSL stands for “Secure Socket Layer”. It’s an internet protocol that encrypts the data transmitted from a person’s browser viewing your website to the server where your site is hosted. An SSL certificate helps enable HTTPS protocol on your website, making the encryption process seamless in the background.

Why Do You Need an SSL Certificate?

SSL is a necessary and critical protocol for your website security and makes it more trustworthy in the eyes of visitors coming to your website.

If a website doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed, Google will flag it as “Not Secure” to users. This will also cause your Google SEO ranking of a site to drastically drop with distrust from users. Thus, if you don’t have an SSL certificate, you might not rank as high as you could and lose potential online visitors.

1. Security of User Data

One of the key functions of SSL certificate is it protects your visitors’ data from being stolen through various hacking methods. If your site isn’t SSL-protected, it won’t load over HTTPS, leaving you open to a variety of cyberattacks. They can capture data packets transmitted en route between your website and your visitors’ browser, then retrieve the data sent from that package.

On the other hand, if your site is protected by an SSL certificate and loads over HTTPS instead of HTTP by default, no one will be able to clone your site from a similar domain. A padlock symbol appears in the browser address bar in front of the URL to verify the legitimacy of the website to your visitors. Hackers can use similar domain names to create a copy of your website. However, the browser will always mark the site as “Not Secure” as it will not be able to verify the site with a legitimate domain.

HTTPS also requires that the transmitted data be encrypted prior to transmission. Even if someone successfully steals the data packet, the data cannot be recovered because the encrypted data packets can be decrypted only with a private key.

2. It Helps Your SEO

Believe it or not, SSL Certificates also help you improve your website’s SEO ranking. Since 2018, websites loading over HTTPS have been given higher preference in Google’s search rankings over sites that do not load over HTTPS. That is right, website security is now considered a ranking signal for Google. Today you won’t even have a single webpage with HTTP on the front page of Google search results for any of the keywords.

What this means is that if you want to be on the front page of Google, you need to have your site loading over HTTPS. And for that to happen, you need to implement an SSL certificate for your website!

3. Make Your Website More Trustworthy

SSL certificates help increase trust in your brand. As we explained above, websites not using HTTPS are marked as “Not Secure” by Google. If you see a red “not secure” label in front of a URL in the address bar, you can imagine the impact this can have on a brand.

After all, the website will give out a perception of not caring about the safety of your customers’ data seriously. An SSL certificate protects you from such images at little to no cost.

4. Speed Up Your Page Speed

An SSL certificate can also increase the loading speed of your website. That is because HTTPS works on HTTP/2, the latest version of HTTP, much faster than the original version. Here is what Google has to say about HTTPS – “HTTP/2 will make our applications faster, simpler, and more robust — a rare combination”.

When your website is loading over HTTPS, you can enable Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology on your site. This allows the webpage to load a compressed version of your webpage on Android smartphones. This can significantly boost the loading speed of your site, which results in better user experience and user retention rates.

5. Better Website Analytics

SSL certificate allows you to get more complete details about your traffic statistics.

If your website does not load over HTTPS, you cannot get referral information from Google Analytics. Referral data is information about the sources of your website’s incoming traffic. Without HTTPS, referral traffic will be counted as direct traffic. This can cause inaccuracies in your data which can affect the bottom line of your digital marketing campaigns.

You can simply fix this issue by adding an SSL certificate for your site and upgrading your website from “HTTP” to “HTTPS”.

Conclusion

So, these are the top five reasons why an SSL certificate is essential for any business website. In summary, an SSL certificate will not only improve your website’s security and performance, it can also provide a more complete referral analytics, increase site trustworthiness and boost your SEO.

If you need help implementing an SSL certifcate for your website, please contact me! You know I am always happy to help.