SSL Certificates
SSL certificates on websites are not a new concept. They’ve been keeping online payment processes secure for many years. Customers who want to make a payment safely on a website only have to look for a little green padlock in the URL bar and they are happy in the knowledge that they’re protected.
It used to be that SSL certificates were only a real necessity on e-commerce websites which took debit or credit card payments online directly.
However, recently Google started to list any website without an SSL certificate as ‘not secure’ on the URL or displaying a little black/round information symbol (instead of a green security padlock) which when highlighted says something along the lines of:
‘Your connection to this site is not secure. You should not enter any sensitive information on this site (for example, passwords or credit cards) because it could be stolen by attackers. Learn more’.
Even websites using a secure payment system such as PayPal, Worldpay and Sage (which often allow customers to make their payment off your site and through the third party’s highly protected site instead), will still need an SSL certificate to get rid of the ‘not secure’ classification. Simply using one of these providers is not enough alone to get your site classified as safe, even if it is.
And then there are those websites which do not take any form of payment at all. Unfortunately even these sites will now be tagged as ‘not secure’ if they do not have an SSL certificate installed. This is because SSL certificates are not just about the payment element. They also help to keep browsing data safe on sites that have data entry fields or use passwords. At the very least, a ‘not secure’ message doesn’t look very professional and it could be enough to scare your customers away before they’ve even had a chance to look around your website.
Fortunately, adding an SSL certificate to your website doesn’t have to be complex. At Design M, we now include standard SSL certificate installation on to all non-ecommerce websites built and hosted with us. We can also arrange installation of higher-grade SSL certificates for our e-commerce website design projects too.
We like to keep the technical things simple for our customers, so if this sounds like your kind of design company then contact us today to discuss how we can help you get your website design project off the ground.
