Getting an SSL certificate for your website is a smart move to cultivate visitor trust and make your website safe from a data breach. When people trust your website, it makes them come back again.
Picking the right SSL certificate and the vendor is challenging as many providers to bundle up extras making purchasers lose objectivity. Typically, buying SSL from third party reseller comes out cheapest; just examine the type of customer assistance you’ll get after the purchase. If you plan to continue association with the same SSL provider for a long period, you can hope for a good discount if you pay multi-year fees upfront.
These questions can help you compare SSL prices and make a prudent buying decision:
- What type of property do you wish to secure (domain, sub-domain, etc.)?
- What is the number of properties you want to protect (Single, wildcard, or multiple)?
- What is the level of protection you want (low, medium, or high)?
- Do you conduct monetary transactions on your website using trusted third parties such as PayPal? If so, you don’t really need to purchase SSL as PayPal will secure transactions on your behalf.
Getting an SSL certificate for your website is needed to cultivate visitor trust because a lot of people are sceptical of going ahead with a website they don’t feel safe using, and rightly so. It also makes your website safe from a data breach.
These days with an increase in cybercrimes, people are learning more and more, most visitors while visiting websites are increasingly mindful of searching the padlock icon in the URL bar.
This is because people are aware that if the padlock is visible on the browser, the site has an installed SSL certificate. This ensures the visitor that and they can securely submit confidential information like credit card details, contact number, passwords, payment details and more to the site.
Users are alerted by browsers that a site is without a valid SSL certificate. Browsers warn users about out of date, misconfigured or missing SSL certificates exactly as Google does, that is, it flags websites that are not secure i.e. are unencrypted sites. These unencrypted sites are marked in red in the URL over the padlock to warn users that the site is not secure – most people who aren’t even tech-savvy know about this. Which gives the users the choice of continuing to the site or leave.
There are many types of SSL certificates available, each with differing levels of protection and usage. To objectively compare the types and vendors of SSL, you need to understand the finer differences between them.
But extreme caution needs to be exercised when applying for SSL. Your SSL can be invalidated for a number of reasons- if you serve mixed content (HTTP+HTTPS); have a domain name mismatch; miss purchasing intermediate/chain certificates; install more than one SSL on the same IP or socket number; or not renew SSL 90 days before its expiration.
