Improve search engine rankings, trust & security with an SSL certificate

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security feature used on the internet. It has many benefits and we recommend everyone uses SSL on their website. SSL used to cost a yearly fee but is now available for free from Let’s Encrypt. It auto-renews and secures your website and email traffic.

Search engine rankings

Google are now taking use of SSL into account when ranking websites:

“we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html 

Trust

If a website has an SSL certificate installed, it shows in modern browsers as ‘secure’. If SSL is not used then the site can display a message saying it’s not secure. This can erode visitor or customer confidence in your website. With internet attacks commonplace, showing that you take security seriously helps increase trust.

An SSL secured website, showing the ‘secure’ message

Security

SSL is especially important if the website allows users to login, for example an ecommerce site with a ‘my account’ area. While most small business websites don’t take any card details on the website itself, securing the login areas for the site admin and users is a step towards a more secure website.

Summary

You can improve your search engine rankings, increase visitor trust and make your website more secure with a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Our green web hosting includes this for free and we can help you configure your website to use SSL. Contact us for more information.