SSL?

Whats the deal with SSL? SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is the standard security protocol for establishing encrypted connections between the website’s server and your browser. Websites that use SSL technology have taken the extra steps to ensures that all data transmitted between the web server and browser remains encrypted. By adding an SSL Certificate to your site, you go from having your site resolve at http:// to https:// The addition of the ‘s’ is what tells you if a site is secure or not.

http stands for ‘Hyper Text Transfer Protocol’ and https stands for ‘Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure’

In the past, it was only required on sites that collected sensitive data such as date of birth, drivers license numbers, credit card information, etc. However, over the last few years, Google has been making a big push for a “Secure Web” where all websites use an SSL and resolve under the https protocol.

Beginning in July 2018 with the release of Chrome 68, Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”. Now, this won’t mean your site won’t still work, but there could be some negative impacts. For example, Google says it’s already rewarding sites that use HTTPS with a slightly higher ranking in internet searches. Therefore, if your site is not secure and your main competitors are, then they could be getting a slightly better search results ranking, which in turn means your potential customers could be finding their sites before yours.

Not having a secure site could also prevent 3rd party APIs from working correctly. HTTPS is a key component to the permission workflows for features such as the geolocation API.

There are different types of SSL certificates, but for the average brochure website, SSL certificates generally aren’t that expensive.  If you have questions about what kind of certificate your website needs, feel free to reach out to us.  We’d be happy to assist.