SSL certificates or your website won’t matter! In this phase of internet & IoT if you’re serving information and conducting any online facing activity SSL certificates are a must, a HTTPS enabled website can help your business in many ways and is essential for strong client relationship building.
How do I know if my website is HTTPS/SSL/TLS secure? A website which is secure will have a ‘padlock’ icon in the URL Location bar. The URL Location bar is where you type in website names like https://www.cadava.com. Sometimes the padlock will be green (like in Firefox browsers) in the majority of others it will probably be dark grey or black. The colour does not matter, what matters is its there. Your website certificates do not last forever and will have to be updated usually annually. A certificate can be for one domain, multiple domains or wildcard which means it can match many domains. e.g. https://business.example.com could need a different certificate to https://finance.example.com.
You can have fun clicking on padlocks to find out more about the certification of the website you’re visiting 🙂.
Why should I secure my website? There are loads of good reasons to go secure and almost none to stay insecure. The main one is trust and confidence from your users. What does this mean, higher trust means more engagement which in turn translates into your profit margins.
What your potential client thinks about insecure websites? Websites that are insecure are seen as old, exploitable, spammy, poorly developed, unmaintained and suspicious. You get the picture. Insecure means unsafe and that’s because it is. It does not matter whether you’re a new SaaS (Software as a Service) startup, hotel or a promoting an event. If your website is not secure it should be.
Will an insecure site affect my ranking? Yes it will, your insecure website will not only throw warnings in Google Chrome the most popular web browser for web and mobile (65% of market share). You will also be impeded in your google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) too. Yes, Google does not like insecure websites and for better or worse (we think better) is serious about promoting best practices for sites using certificates.
Will my website work without certificates? Kind of, with limitations. Yes your site will load a webpage, however it will be penalised with browser warnings. In the future of web the best practice is for sites to be secure and I can envisage a future where non-secure websites will no longer be supported in some browsers especially for commercial websites.
Certificates can be scary and your first time learning and understanding can be daunting. At Cadava we offer 100% free certificates for life. Get in touch and one of the team can help guide you through our products.
Thank you – The Cadava team!