If we ask you the most important thing for a modern business website in today’s era, what will you choose from this list: Design, user experience, marketing, or security? While all of them are crucial, you’ve to select the most important one. You can click here and check more on design.
Many of you might have chosen any of these things based on your profession and knowledge but let me tell you which one we would choose: Security! Because if a business website is not secure enough in today’s era, the kind of damage it can do to the business is unimaginable. And when it comes to website security, one of the first and most important things is getting an SSL certificate and installed on your site. Why? Well, that is precisely what we are going to answer in this article. We are going to share with you five reasons why SSL is essential for any business website. Let us begin:
The main reason behind the importance of SSL Certificate – Security of User Data.
First, it protects your visitors’ data from being stolen through a variety of hacking techniques. If your website is not protected with SSL, it will not load over HTTPS protocol, which can open it to a variety of cyberattacks. They can capture data packets transmitted between you and your visitors (a technique known as packet sniffing), and then recover the data being sent from those packets.
On the other hand, if your site is protected with an SSL certificate, and therefore loading over HTTPS instead of the default HTTP, no one can clone your site on a similar domain. A padlock is shown in the browser address bar before the URL of your website, which validates your business’s identity for your visitors. A cybercriminal can get a similar-looking domain name to create a copy of your site. Still, the browsers will always mark that site as ‘Not Secure’ in the address bar because he will not be able to protect it with an SSL certificate purchased in the name of your company.
HTTPS protocol also requires data being transmitted to be encrypted before transmission. If someone manages to steal the data packets, they will not recover any data because the encrypted data packets can be decrypted only with a private key that remains available on your server along with the certificate.
Other reasons why SSL is essential for your business.
Besides the security of user data, there are several other reasons why an SSL certificate is essential for your business. Here they are:
1. It helps your SEO
Believe it or not, but SSL Certificates also help you improve your search engine optimization or SEO. In case you do not know, websites loading over HTTPS are given higher preference in Google’s search rankings over sites that do not load over HTTPS. They did it a long time ago, and today things have come to a point where you cannot find even a single webpage with HTTP on the front page of Google search results for any of the keywords. Try it!
What it means is that if you want to be on the front pages of Google, you need to have your site loading over HTTPS. And for that to happen, you need to have an SSL certificate installed on your server. That is how an SSL certificate helps your SEO.
2. It increases the trust in your brand
Another thing that an SSL certificate does is increasing trust in your brand. As we explained above, websites not loading over HTTPS are marked as ‘Not Secure’ by web browsers. If there is a Red’ Not Secure’ label appearing before your URL in the address bar, you can imagine what impact it can have on your brand’s perception. You will come out as someone who does not take the security of your customers seriously. An SSL certificate protects you from such an image, so you should buy an SSL certificate to increase your brand’s trustworthiness.
3. It speeds up your website
An SSL certificate can also increase the loading speed of your website. That is because HTTPS works on HTTP/2, the latest version of HTTP, much faster than the original version. As a result, the TLS handshake takes much less time than it would take on HTTP.
Secondly, once your website is loading over HTTPS, you can enable Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology on your site, which loads a lighter (and therefore faster) version of your webpage on Android smartphones. That is way, it can significantly boost the loading speed of your site. And since Android smartphones account for most internet users worldwide, loading fast on them is very important for your website.
4. It provides complete statistics
Finally, you also do not get complete details about your traffic statistics in the absence of an SSL certificate. If your website does not load over HTTPS, you cannot get referral data from Google Analytics. Referral data means data about the sources from where you get your traffic. All the traffic that you get from other sites is shown as direct traffic, so you cannot gauge accurately which of your marketing campaigns are working. On the other hand, if your website loads over HTTPS, you can avoid this problem as Google Analytics will show you complete data about various referral sources to your site.
Conclusion
So, these are the top five reasons why an SSL certificate is essential for any business website. There are several other reasons too, but these are the most crucial ones – and these should also be more than enough to give you an idea of how SSL is vital for your business. You can purchase an SSL easily as there are many SSL resellers like SSL2BUY and certificate authorities from which you can purchase a reliable SSL certificate. If you still have any reservations or doubts on the subject, share them in the comments, and we will try our best to respond to your queries.
