It seems as though not a single week goes by without hearing of a company that has just been hacked. While large companies such as TalkTalk and SONY are often the targets for hackers, the fact is the more vulnerable your website is, then the more likely your website is of getting hacked – even if you’re not a large multi-national organisation. Small websites get hacked too…
If you have your own website then it’s recommended that you take all necessary measures to protect it. One popular tool that people are increasingly implementing to protect their website is an SSL Certificate.
If you do business over your website – especially if you accept online payments – then it’s vital that your website has an SSL Certificate. It’s a wise investment.
What is SSL?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), also known as digital certificate, establishes an encrypted connection between a web server and a website, allowing confidential information to be transmitted securely.
SSL is the backbone of a secure website and it protects sensitive information on your website from fraudsters and hijacking. SSL offers protection for your website and your customers.
If you look at the Easyspace website you’ll have noticed that we now run our website under SSL as standard. If you were go to the non SSL URL, e.g. type in http:// rather than https://, you’ll see we redirect to the https:// version of our site.
Benefits of having SSL for your website
We implemented SSL for the security of our website, which not only increases the protection of our website and our customers, but at the same time helps gain us new customers That change might make the difference between us gaining a few customers, so it was a worthwhile investment for us – and will be for you too.
Key benefits of having an SSL Certificate for your website:
Boosts Security
An SSL Certificate will keep all your website information secure during transmission. It gives you a competitive edge by securing safe online transactions, and it offers strong data encryption
Boosts Customer Trust
Many internet users will refuse to provide personal details or conduct transaction on unprotected websites, so by having an SSL certificate for your site it provides a trustworthy online presence for your website visitors – which will result in more sales.
When a website visitor connects to a web server using SSL certificate they will see that the URL in the address bar with https:// rather than the usual http://. Websites with SSL certificate will also display a small padlock in their browser.
Boosts SEO Rankings
As we move ever more online and print media and traditional forms of advertising take a back seat to online, where you rank on Google really matters and so if you can do anything to improve your search engine ranking you should.
It came as a bit of a surprise in August 2014 when Google updated it’s search engine algorithm (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html) for “HTTPS Everywhere” meaning that they were planning to use HTTPS as part of the search algorithm. Basically, if your web site runs with SSL then it’s more likely you will get a higher ranking on search engines such as Google.
What type of sites can I secure with SSL?
- Web server
- Email servers
- Webmail
- Databases
- FTP sites
- Online chats
- Login pages
- Online portals
- Customer portals
- Banking
- Transactional website (ecommerce)
- Web portals
- Corporate intranets & extranets
- Wikis
- VPNs
- and much more
Which SSL?
Easyspace offers a range of leading SSL certificates such as GeoTrust, VeriSign and Thawte for all types of websites and budgets, to maximise trust for your online business and provide an essential peace of mind when it comes to security. For example, we provide SSL for sites that are static or dynamic, and include a warrantly from $10k up to $500k
How to get an SSL certificate?
It’s very easy to arrange an SSL certificate. The Easyspace web page https://www.easyspace.com/ssl-certificates details all the certificates we have on general offer, but there are other, more specialist certificates, for example for code signing for developers that we can obtain if required. Feel free to ask any of the Easyspace staff and we’ll happily advise you on what you might need.
People prefer visiting secure websites, so make sure you have one. With an SSL cetificate you can achieve this. Best of all you’ll even get an SEO boost from it too – so don’t delay getting your own SSL certificate today.
