An SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer in full which is also called a Digital Certificate, provides a secure link between a website and a visitor's browser. Let us explain what is SSL in this article.
With an SSL Certificate, if you sell products or services on your website and accept credit cards online, you need it for website security. If you don't sell online but want to add credibility to your website, a website confirm seal may be sufficient.
In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of SSL certificate for your business and personal website. For several years now, players in the internet business like Google have been working towards making the web a safer place by requesting website owners to use the HTTPS protocol that ensures that data is encrypted and securely transmitted between a server and a client computer.
Benefits of having SSL on your website
Google, one of the biggest companies in internet business has highlighted that with the release of Chrome 68 in July 2018, the safety measures will become even more rigorous. All websites which would have not adopted the HTTPS will be marked as not secure. Those that conform to this measure, will continue to be displayed with green https letters in the URL, which means they are secured by an SSL certificate.
A number of organisations and users have been inhibited from adopting SSL certificates due to the price and the implementation process which is somewhat complex. There is however a paradigm shift as the price has become cheaper and some being offered for free.
SSL certificate does not only secure your connection, there are also other advantages which come with it.
For instance, an SSL certificates will protect the sensitive data that moves to and from your website. Critical information which is also sensitive could include payment or personal information. SSL certificates will encrypt the connection and help protect your visitors’ data from being misused by attackers.
An SSL certificate gives your website a trusted site status. All major browsers that include Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Firefox have since used the notice "The site is not secure." for all sites without the SSL certificate.
An SSL certificate helps your site to have higher rankings. Google highlighted that they were going to give a higher preference to all sites which have SSL certificates.
SSL certificate help to remove phishing from the internet. Phishing is a process where hackers create an identical website with the idea of stealing important information like credit cards, log in credentials which they use for malicious purposes.
How to get SSL certificate on your website
So the way to go is to have an SSL certificate installed on your website. Many hosting providers offer to their clients free of charge or a small fee installation of ssl certificates. Most commonly used in these days are Comodo, VeriSign, GeoTrust and Digicert but those ssl issuers are not free and you have to pay for their services. On the other had we have widely adopted Lets Encrypt ssl certificates and currently many hosting providers have support for it.
What is the difference between paid and free SSL?
Now you are wondering what is the difference? Why would I pay if I can get something for free? Well diffence between free and paid ssl is in better encryption and with paid ssl you will get waranty if your ssl security get broken.
But either way SSl certificate is a must in this day and time. Currently in our country Zimbabwe due to trade embargos posed by the United States of America, we can not use for example Comodo ssl certificates or even cloudflare.
But if your hosting provider allows it you can add free lets encrypt ssl certificate yourself (If you have SSL/TLS option available in your Cpanel for example) and that will be explained in another article.
If you have any questions feel free to post a comment below.
