Why your site needs SSL Certificate?

When you run an online business or a small company, every single client is important and counts. For all the reasons we have already explained, installing a Secure Sockets Layer certificate will ensure that your customers know you care about their safety.
The cost of an SSL certificate is a small investment comparing to what business you might lose.

If your website is secure and has an SSL Certificate, then Google will definitely rank your website and give it a boost in terms of ranking. Google checks many factors for your website to be listed. One of them is an SSL Certificate. Therefore, this is one of the main benefits of an SSL certificate. Google already claimed that the most natural thing that a company can do to boost their website’s ranking is to use an SSL certificate. Therefore SSL plays a vital role in having your website ranked for SEO purposes.

Whenever a user visits your website, if it has an SSL certificate, he/she can easily trust your website. They can enter their data and information without having to worry about their data getting exploited. Therefore, SSL gives your site a boost in User’s trust too. As we all know this very well, Company-User bond is based on faith, either there is trust or not. To fulfil that trust, you have to gain something which is evidence of that trust. A big part of that trust is a simple “SSL Certificate.”

From 2018 and onward, Google decided to make SSL mandatory for safer web experience. Websites that do not use SSL will eventually get flagged by the search engine itself. Therefore, if your website does not have an SSL certificate, then you should definitely buy it. If a website doesn’t have SSL security, ranking on google (if any) will be much lower. In fact, not only Google but even the web browsers, such as Google Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc., will show a ‘Not Secured’ message to whoever visiting the site. It’s a terrible impression that your unsecured site will leave on that user. There is even this possibility that these non-secured websites might be blocked permanently shortly.
Either you have a simple blog or a professional website; it’s recommended to have an SSL/TLS certificate for that website. Though, in a nutshell, it is more accurate to refer to it as certificates to use with SSL or TLS cause SSL/TLS is actually a protocol which is determined by configuration in your server. Nevertheless, there is a chance that you might lose a large number of followers due to the small ‘Site Not Secured’ message.

Not to mention that if you wish to be GDPR compliant, you need to have a secure website by SSL certificate in order to encrypt clients data when collecting any information sent by the clients, nevermind that it might be only a name and an email address. As you well know, GDPR non-compliance could penalise your businesses with hefty fines. Ofion can provide you with one of the best SSL services there is now, with TLSv1.3 and 256-bit encryption, and we can also assist you with assessing your website GDPR compliance and overall security of your website.

The central concept of HTTP and HTTPS is the same. To get deep into this topic, we need to know what HTTP is first. The term ‘HTTP’ stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It’s a syntax for sending information (read your or user data) all over the internet. Almost all information that is sent over the internet is with the use of HTTP. It’s a transfer protocol for transmitting data.

So what’s the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

The letter ‘S’ in HTTPS stands for Secured. Therefore, HTTPS is HTTP but secured. The main difference is that HTTPS uses TLS (basically that is an updated version of SSL, somewhere referred to as SSLv4). So it’s even more secure than SSL. Moreover, for any website/server security measures, HTTPS is definitely better. TLS uses a technology called public-key encryption where we have two keys, a public and a private key, and where the public key is shared with all client devices via the server’s SSL certificate. When a site visitor opens a connection with a server (visit your website), the two devices (server and user computer) use the public and private key to agree on new keys, which are in turn called session keys, to encrypt further communications between itself.
All HTTP requests and responses are then encrypted with these session key so that anyone who intercepts communications can only see a random string of characters, not the plaintext.

And what about SSL vs TLS?

The difference is not just in a name, TLS (Transport Layer Security) and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). As for SSL, it is in public use since 1995 (SSLv2), since v1 was never released to the public, and over the years there was a number of versions which improved security over the previous version and introduced new features, TLS1.0 is just another name for the SSLv4, and SSLv2 & SSLv3 have been depreciated already by 2015. For these reasons, only TLS protocols should be enabled on the servers. Current TLS version in use is 1.2, but with 1.3 being approved last year and subsequently published, this will be new accepted SSL standard, the major browsers already have added support for it and all the SSL Certificates we supply our clients with are TLSv1.3.

Conclusion

So now to answer the question “Do I need an SSL Certificate for my Website”? The answer is ‘Absolutely’. For safety measures, it’s a must for most website.
As a company, we should respect the consumer’s privacy. Therefore, SSL certificate is the evidence that you don’t let your customers trust down by any means.
If your site is without an SSL certificate, you should definitely contact us to provide hosting service which supports TLSv1.3 and install an SSL certificate for you. We provide you with one of the best SSL services there is, and all our SSL certificates are up to 256-bit encryption strength and with the powerful 2048-bit signature key.