…if not, then your ranking may begin to suffer on Google.

What is SSL?

Most of us have seen sites that use SSL when we shop online. In your browser address bar, you will see a padlock, and at the start of the URL will be highlighted in green:

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security technology that creates an encrypted link between a server and the visitors browser — it also works with email servers and a mail client such as Outlook. The SSL will allow any sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and login credentials to be transmitted securely, thus making it difficult for anyone to use if they intercept this information.

How do I use SSL?

For browsers to interact with secured web servers using the SSL protocol, they need to use a SSL Certificate to be able to establish a secure connection between both ends. The SSL Certificates has a key pair: a public and a private key – which work together to create the encrypted connection.

These certificates can be purchased and installed onto your server easily -all you need to do is contact your hosting company to discuss it with them. If your site is hosted with CuCo, just drop your account handler an email and they will happily talk it through with you.

But my site is not eCommerce, do I still need one?

Well, two main reasons:

Google announced that SSL would become a ranking signal – although a small one at first – but for a long time now, Google has been an advocate of Internet security, and all signs demonstrate that SSL certificates will most likely become a more highly- weighted signal in the future.

Secondly, browsers such as Chrome are making changes to their UI that would alert users to non-secure sites. For example they will soon begin displaying a red “X” in the address bar for sites that aren’t secured via SSL. This will give your visitors a negative experience when visiting your site as they will believe it is unsafe.

Key-Points While Using an SSL Certificate As Recommended By Google

• Choose the type of certificate that you require: multi-domain, single, or wildcard certificate

•Use 2048-bit key certificates

• Use relative URLs for resources which reside on the same secure domain

• Permit the indexing of your webpages by search engines where applicable. Sidestep the no index robots Meta tag

•Never block your HTTPs website from crawling using robots

•Use protocol relative Universal Resource Locators (URLs) for all other domains.

 

We hope to see more websites using HTTPS in the future. Let’s all make the web more secure!