Is Your Website Costing You Business?

Website security should be high on your agenda. You need an SSL certificate. We do all sorts of things to protect our website from external forces trying to access it. We download plugins, regularly update passwords, change information and more. But you’re not the only ones looking at how secure your website is. Your customers are too.

In technical terms, an SSL certificate is a collection of small data files that digitally bind a crypto graphic key to a business’s details. When you install an SSL certificate onto your web server you activate a protocol which displays a small padlock in a web browser before where you can see your URL. You will also notice that the website goes from being HTTP to HTTPS.

Well, apart from making your website more secure, which should be a no-brainer, it can do other things too.

An SSL makes your business look more trustworthy. From a customer perspective, having an SSL certificate demonstrates you are serious about the security of your website, and more importantly, their details. Any data sent will be secure, and this is reassuring to those visiting your website. This creates an impression that you are reliable and legitimate, which means they are more likely to do business with you.

This is something which you may not have been aware of but major search engines, such as Google, look for this type of website security when crawling your sites. They tend to favor those websites who have SSL certificates, as they don’t want to send visitors to potentially unsecured websites. This means that having an SSL could help you become more visible to users searching online.

As you visit various websites on the internet you may come across those that are flagged as “not secure” in the URL. This is because they do not have an SSL certificate. But, it doesn’t look great for your business if this is one of the first things a prospective customer sees.

Most of the big online payment providers, like Stripe, require an SSL certificate in order for their service to be used on a website. By not having one you are limiting yourself and your business in how it can accept payment, which could mean a loss of business.