Do I Need An SSL Certificate?

With the amount of time spent online still growing steadily, making sure that your website is well configured is crucial.  Picture this, you’ve spent the time and money to design and build your dream website. You launch the site, advertise it, kick back and await the customers, but nothing happens.  Why could this be? Perhaps it’s because when going to view your website, the user was hit with this:

With a huge global increase in online activity, we have sadly seen an increase in cyber-crime.  People are rightfully concerned about this, and as such, they will take serious notice of warnings such as this.

Since version 68, Google Chrome now actively displays a “Not Secure” message in the address bar if the site is not using SSL.  If you’re running a website that lets users pay for things online, Chrome will actually flag up a warning message during the checkout process if an SSL is not installed.

So what can you do?

You’ve probably noticed while browsing the web that most websites you visit have a padlock present in the address bar.  

This is because these sites have something called an SSL Certificate.  An SSL certificate ensures that the data being transferred between the user’s browser and the webserver is secure.  It also prevents Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera and other browsers from displaying an array of “Not Secure” messages that will drive users away from your site.

Installing an SSL certificate allows your website’s traffic to be served over HTTPS (Hyper- text Transfer Protocol Secure) instead of HTTP (Hyper-text Transfer Protocol).  This means that the data being sent and received is private, and cannot be intercepted by third parties. Google also ranks sites using HTTPS higher in search results than those that are not using it.

It was reported in 2018 that 51.8% of the one million most popular websites in the world are using HTTPS.  With all the benefits and the increased security of SSL technology, it is no surprise that SSL is becoming a standard for the web.  Not having one can seriously hinder your website’s success, and that is exactly why we recommend an SSL certificate as a must-have to all of our clients. If you would like to know more about the importance of SSL to your businesses website, then please feel free to get in touch with us today.