The power of HTTPS

If you’ve got a business website and are serious about keeping it afloat, then HTTPS is an absolute must. A few years ago, a lot of smaller companies were able to get away without using Secure Socket Layer Certificates (or, SSL for short), but today, that’s no longer an option. If all of this sounds a bit too technical for you, don’t worry – we’ll explain everything! Read this article until the end and you’ll come away knowing all about:

• What is an SSL Certificate
• How SSL Certificates protect your clients and brand reputation
• How SSL Certificates help you rank higher on Google Search
• How SSL Certificates can get you more customers
• The best places to get SSL Certificates

What is an SSL Certificate?

We’re going to start with the basics. SSL is a special type of internet protocol, which encrypts data transmissions. When a user opens up a website, protected by an SSL Certificate, the site issues a unique decryption key for the user. Anyone, attempting to read the data, transmitted between the user’s device and the website will only see gibberish, instead of letters or numbers. This will ensure the safety of any data that the user chooses to provide to the site – physical or email addresses, user names, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

How SSL Certificates protect your clients and brand reputation

If your website is not equipped with an SSL certificate, any unsavoury individual with a bit of tech know-how can intercept the connection and read the data transfers happening between your website and its visitors (known as “the man in the middle attack”). Between the possibility of spammers getting a hold of contact details, scammers getting their hands on your user’s valuable private data or hackers managing to snatch their credit card details, the results for your brand can be disastrous.

SSL certificates can also protect you against imposters. Before the advent of mass certification, it was very common for hackers to create “duplicates” of websites. These were exact copies of a given website, down to the very last aspect of its design, with the only difference being a simple letter in the URL (as each registered domain name is unique). For example, a hacker could create a website that looks exactly like ours, but the address would be fomee.agency instead of fome.agency. How does SSL help you against this? It’s quite simple really – when you purchase an SSL certificate, the certification authority (or “CA”, for short), will require that you demonstrate the legitimacy of the business and prove that you are indeed the owner. This makes it almost impossible for scammers and hackers to obtain SSL certification for their fake websites, forcing them to resort to unverified providers or self-issuing, both of which will now result in their website being flagged as “unsafe.”

How SSL Certificates help you rank higher on Google Search

As you might’ve heard, Google is a company that always places ease of use and user safety first. All of their ranking algorithms have always been based around these two factors, and they try their best to prevent malicious or straight-up bad websites from showing up high in their results. This is why things like high-quality website content, optimised pictures, heading tags, appropriate descriptions and fast page loading times are counted as important ranking factors – they’re just some of the best ways to determine how good a user will feel on your website!

Knowing this, Google’s decision to include SSL certification in its list of must-haves should not come as a surprise to anyone. If you have a website that is yet to get SSL-certified, you’re essentially sabotaging your own company!

How SSL Certificates can get you more customers

Before you dismiss the idea because your clients just aren’t all that tech-savvy, allow us to remind you that pretty much every modern browser will now notify the users whether the website is SSL certified. And it won’t just tell them “this website doesn’t provide you with SSL certification”. Oh no, it’ll straight up tell them that they aren’t safe on your website and ask them if they want to leave immediately. And, well, you can imagine what most people would do in this situation, right?

But there’s one more thing that SSL certification brings to the table, and that’s the feeling of security. Your users might not know what the green padlock in their address bar means, but the “SECURE CONNECTION” label right next to your website’s name will ensure them that they’re exactly where they need to be – in the capable and caring hands of their service provider!

Where to get your SSL Certificates

You can purchase an SSL certificate from:

• Rapid SSL - from ￡49 per year
• 123reg - from 47.99 per year
• Siteground - if you host your website with Siteground you will receive a Free SSL certificate
• Hosting.co.uk - from ￡7.50 per year

In closing

We want to remind you that we live in the digital age. Every Internet user owns multiple accounts over many online platforms, most of which are equipped with state-of-the-art encryption. After reading this article, would you be okay with trusting a website tagged as NOT SECURE? How do you think your visitors would feel if your website presented them with such a tag?

Always keep in mind that safety and security go hand in hand with Google positions. If you want to get many visitors, getting an SSL certificate is crucial.

 ? FOME