The Advantages of SSL/HTTPS for your business

What is SSL/HTTPS?

SSL stands for "secure sockets layer"  and is designed to stop people spying on your communication between the website and your browser. It helps keep your personal information that you give to websites secure, things such as passwords and credit card information.

What Are the Benefits of SSL?

Encrypts Information

The main purpose of SSL/HTTPS is that it encrypts the data between the server and the browser, this means that a hacker that tried to look at the data in the middle would see a bunch of meaningless characters and numbers. 

Without the required "key" to un-encrypt the code it is essentially useless to the hacker and your data is safe.

SSL/HTTPS also stops the man in the middle attacks where a middle man "hacker" would change the page before it reaches you the browser, this isnt much of an issue when your just browsing a news website but it's a huge deal when using your internet banking!

How to know when a page is secure?

Customers visiting your website will know easily if it's a secure website by looking at the address bar and see if it say HTTPS and is usually coloured in green (colour of safety)

We’ll take one of our hotel websites as an example of SSL certified site. Here you can see it shows https instead of the usual http. It is also coloured in green and has a padlock to show it is secure.

If you click on the padlock you can see more information and even view the certificate and who provided it.

You can also see the details of the SSL certificate:

Necessary for Accepting Payments

People still need to be careful of entering their credit cards into a website, and even if your using a 3rd party option to collect the card details your website needs to have SSL/HTTPS also. The main reason for this is the MITM (Man in the middle) attack that i talked about earlier.

Example: A hotel website traffic is intercepted by a hacker, the hotel uses a third party booking engine to accept bookings and card details. But because the hotel website is not secure the hacker can change the link to another page which also looks like a booking page but now it's stealing guests credit card details.

More Trust

Having that green seal of approval and the secure padlock just makes you look more professional and secure in general. Providign your customers a secure website which improves confidence and gives the buyer a better buying experience.

Given the benefits, going through the process necessary to obtain a trusted SSL certificate is worth the effort. Operating without one puts off customers and makes it impossible to take payments online.

Your customers want to know that their sensitive personal information is safe as it goes through cyberspace, and investing in SSL/HTTPS security is the best way to give them that peace of mind.

Google Love

Did you know that Google gives any website with SSL/HTTPS a small boost in search engine rankings? Google is on a mission to promote security on the internet and it will put more and more weight onto website with security as time goes on.

Disadvantages of SSL/HTTPS?

There is only one... Cost. It typically costs around $100 a year to get a certificate. and it must be done by your system admin or server host.

Luckily for customers of my business we supply all hotel websites with SSL/HTTPS certificates free as standard.

Overall it is worth the $100 price tag to get a small SEO boost, increased security, increased trust and a better buying experience.