NEWS

To SSL or not to SSL

SSL Certificates, Website Encryption, https.

What is it and why is it important to both your Google Ranks and customer engagement?

You may have heard some of these terms, but what do they mean and how does it affect your website?

SSL?

Secure Socket Layer or commonly referred to as SSL, is an encryption method utilised on your website as part of your hosting and connected to your domain (www.yourdomain.com.au)

How does it work? when you visit any website, you transfer data between your computer and the computer (server) where the website you are visiting is located.

To make it easier to follow, let’s consider this connection between your computer and a server as a road or highway and the sending and receiving of information as vehicles moving up and down the road (Traffic).

This traffic is traveling on a public road that is not secure, its able to be intercepted, read, and manipulated.

This can be bad for not only the website but also the person (you) trying to access said website.

Enter: The SSL By installing and setting up an SSL certificate on a website, you (going back to the road analogy) a secure and guarded access road is created, being able to use this road requires you to authenticate yourself to then be permitted temporary access to the road (like a visitors pass) to be able to then securely communicate between your computer and the website server, making it incredibly difficult to intercept, read and manipulate any communication between you and the website.

But what has this got to do with my website, my customers, and my ranking?

In short everything, let’s look at each point:

Your Customers: Customers need to trust you, in this ever-evolving technology-driven era, people are becoming more and more aware of the dangers, scams and generally not nice side of people and their use (and manipulation) of the internet and everything in it.

With the vast majority of the human race consuming and engaging with thousands of gigabytes of data a year, via apps, websites and other mediums, the quantity, frequency and method the not-so-nice people use and employ to attempt to either annoy you or try and profit from you or your customers is ever-changing.

More and more people are becoming aware if the website they are on is secure or not, Google (and other Search Engines) are making it more and more obvious when a website is not secure, resulting in visitors leaving your site in greater numbers and with greater frequency.

The result? Less visitors spending less time and not engaging with your business due to a lack of trust.

Your Ranking: Google has for a while now factored into their algorithm if your website is secure (https) or not.

While we do not know the exact metric, we do know that evidence is showing a website that is similar in size, speed, content and many of the other factors Google uses to determine a site's rank, that utilises an SSL Certificate, will rank higher than the website that does not.

It is still very startling as to the number of websites that to this very day, are still not running on https.