It’s been two years since Google’s SSL recommendation to all websites. Just like we predicted, Google is finally starting to enforce it. For those who don’t know, Google released Chrome 56 last month. This new version might impact websites without SSL certificates.
What Chrome 56 does is that for any website that is without SSL or properly securing pages, it will display that websites or certain pages are not secure to visitors.
In recent years, security has been a big concern to most people. Especially when it comes to online security and privacy, people are becoming more alert when surfing websites.
Now, for business owners, we know we all want people to visit our websites with peace of mind. People will less likely to stay on your websites if your websites are not secured. Especially when it comes to ecommerce websites, if you are selling anything on your websites, SSL will not be an option, but it will be a must implementation.
Of course, you might ask what if my website is just regular informational website; do I still need to have SSL installed? Well, the short answer is yes. There are many reasons why you should have it sooner rather than later. For example, better user experience, Google ranking, etc. There are still many websites that are running without SSL installed, and many of them are in process of switching over to https. In a year or two, most websites will be running with https. You can either be in it or left behind.
Most hosting companies sell SSL certificate, so you can purchase SSL certificate through your hosting company. There are different levels of certificate. Although they are essentially doing the same thing, that is encrypting information during SSL/TLS negotiations, there are basically three types of certificates: Domain Validated Certificate, Organization Validated Certificate, and Extended Validation Certificate.
Domain Validated Certificates are certificates that are checked with domain registry, whereas Organization Validated Certificates are certificates that are checked with business registry that is hosted by governments, and Extended validation Certificates are most trusted and secure which mostly for big organizations.
For example, if you have Godaddy as your hosting company, you can go to https://www.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate. They have three options: protect one website, protect multiple websites, and protect all subdomains. For any regular website, protect one website will most be the option for you. But again, it will really depend on what you need or want.
For those who do not know, purchasing SSL certificate is just the first step of securing website. After you have purchased the certificate, you will need to install SSL on your domain. And then after that, you will need to change your domain url to https, as well as all the links and images paths. Finally, you will need to do 301 redirect from your old http to https, so that you don’t lose any SEO juice and anyone who has your old url bookmarked can be automatically redirected to your new https website.
If you feel like the process is too complicated or too much for you to switching over to https, you can always contact us, we will do it for you. We have installed SSL certificates on many websites that are on different web hosting platforms.
