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What is an SSL Security Certificate?
Evolving Media CHRONICLES
By Jeff Poissant
SSL and Secure Certificates provide security for your website by encrypting communications between the server and the person visiting your site. To use SSL, you need to have an SSL Certificate (also known as a Secure Certificate) installed on your host account and a dedicated IP address, and visitors to your website need to use a modern web browser, such as recent versions of Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome.
What is it used for?
Any personal information you gather through a contact form, credit card, subscription service, or e-commerce must be secure. Privacy Laws place the onus on you when people access your website.
SSL Certificates help to encrypt and protect data from being intercepted while connected to your host account.
Do I need one?
Times have changed, and Google and the Mozilla Foundation have made it essential to have an SSL Certificate. Google and other search engines identify and mark a website as secured or not secured when a user searches for your website on the page. If your site is encrypted, it will encourage people to visit it, and your website ranking will also be affected.
Credit card associations and networks require an SSL Certificate if you accept credit card payments online whenever you transmit credit card information, such as the card number, cardholder’s name, expiration date, CVV code, etc. (such as when a customer enters their credit card on your shopping cart order form or payment page.
In addition to being Payment card industry compliance (PCI compliant), which is required by Visa, MasterCard, Discover Network, American Express, Diners Club International, JCB, and your payment processing company, your customers also see if your order form or shopping cart is secure before entering their credit card information. You can only earn sales if your customers see your site as safe.
I use PayPal; customers do not enter their credit card information directly.
PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon Payments require a website to use an SSL Certificate since you are the weak link when transmitting payment information.
Do you still need convincing?
As of 2018, it is mandatory to purchase and install an SSL Security Certificate to encrypt and protect the connection between a client’s computer and the server, your website.
Privacy laws mandate the requirement for Google, Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft, Safari, and other web browsers and search engines. Websites that an SSL Certificate does not protect are identified as unsafe in search results and blocked access by major web browsers, preventing potential clients from viewing your website.
During the summer of 2018, I wrote the original article. Fast forward to today, businesses are looking for whatever savings they can garner as prices overall, due to poor fiscal decisions by our different levels of government, have eroded sustainability – a vast majority of businesses need to find stability.
To assist businesses on the budget side of things and to ensure a company meets the bare minimum of PCI compliance, the first level, the domain-level SSL certificate, is offered free as a shared domain-level SSL Certificate when hosting your site with Evolving Media & Design Inc.
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