Why should you secure your website with SSL?

You might not know it but you already know the answer to that question. The real question is “Why have you not yet secured your site with an SSL?”

Firstly, let’s just confirm we understand what it is exactly we are securing your site for. Ultimately, it’s for users that visit your site. We want them to trust us and make sure that any data they input via contact forms, email sign-ups, or purchases is going to be safely encrypted, so no horrible hackers can steal it.

Secondly, Google tells us to secure our sites, and what Google says, we do! Unless of course, you are not interested in getting your website ranking anywhere near page one of search engine results. Everyone has been a little slow in the uptake of Secure Socket Layer (SSL), unless they were an online banking website or big eCommerce store. Well, here’s news for you guys, EVERY SITE should be secure if you value your website visitors to ever come back.

That’s assuming, of course, they even visit your site in the first place, as earlier this year Google Chrome Web Browser (biggest share of web browsers 10:1) updated its browser and this is how it will show non-secure sites to users when they visit:

Not pretty and actually quite scary! So now is the time to get ahead of everybody and sort your own site out now with an SSL certificate.

It’s pretty easy to do, but you’ll need to speak with your hosting provider in order to get setup. They don’t cost too much to purchase, there are even free versions available from Let’s Encrypt. If we are building a new website for our customers, we always recommend they “go secure” with their hosting, for the SEO benefits alone.