4 Major Benefits of an SSL (TLS) Certificate

Would you buy anything on a website which Google flags as Not Secure? Probably not, as you do not want your most sensitive data to be leaked by cybercriminals or any third parties. Google tries to protect you and asks you to leave such websites. Thus, if you are a seller and do not want to unintentionally force your customers out of your site, make sure to install an SSL Certificate.

What is an SSL Certificate?

In brief, SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a standard technology for establishing an encrypted connection between a web server (your website) and a client (your customer’s web browser). The updated and more secure version of SSL is called TLS (Transport Layer Security). Website owners can obtain SSL Certificates from trusted Certificate Authorities. For more information on how to obtain and implement SSL on your website, you can check out our previous blog article.

Important UPDATE: It has recently been announced that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are planning to disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 versions in their browsers (Chrome, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari) starting January 2020. It means that all websites will need to enable TLS 1.2 or later versions. Site owners are suggested to start implementing these changes now.

No matter which version you use at the moment, SSL can bring you some considerable advantages either way. In this blog post, we introduce 4 benefits that SSL provides.

Protection from Data Leakage

SSL helps you protect your online shop from hackers and identity thieves. When a website is SSL-secured, the transmitted information is encrypted and thus cannot be stolen by third parties. In fact, the data becomes meaningless to anyone except for the intended recipient. Thus, with Secure Sockets Layer, you can minimize data breaches and cybercrimes.

In addition, if you are planning to accept card payments on your website, SSL is definitely a must for you. Credit card data is the most important and the most vulnerable information that users fill in on different websites. So, it should be necessarily encrypted.

Building Customers’ Trust

Information security is vital to everyone these days. Potential customers will recognize your website as secure and reliable if they see a lock icon and https instead of http in the address bar. They will know that you care for their security, and it will build customer trust and your brand’s reputation. On the contrary, when visitors are warned by a browser that a particular website is not secure, they tend to leave such a website. An increasing bounce rate and a short session time may cause substantial damage to the website’s ranking and traffic.

Improvement of SEO and Ranking

SSL can improve your website’s ranking on major search engines. Since July 2018, SSL has become obligatory for all websites, not only e-commerce ones. If your website doesn’t have an SSL Certificate, it may not only lose its ranking position but also push your visitors away. Chrome now flags all non-secure websites and encourages users to leave. So, if you don’t want to dig yourself into a hole, install an SSL Certificate.

Visitors seeing that your website is protected will stay longer there. It is one of the primary factors that can improve your SEO. Additionally, an SSL may increase your site load speed which is also one of Google’s ranking factors.

Focus on Business

With SSL, you do not have to worry about the data transfer security and can fully concentrate on doing your business.

An SSL Certificate is a must for your website without any doubt, and it certainly does a great job of securing data transfers. Nonetheless, it does not ensure your website’s absolute protection; therefore, you should consider ways of preventing other security issues including malware attacks. What are your thoughts on TLS? Feel free to share them with us in the comments section!

Also, take a look at our video explaining what is an SSL certificate:

Update: TLS 1.0 and 1.1 deprecated

Cardinity would like to update all of our current customers that as from June 1^st, 2020 TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will no longer be supported.

We recommend that all merchants turn off TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 as soon as possible. All combinations of client servers and browser servers should use TLS version 1.2 (or a later version) to make sure that all connections can be made without issues. We strongly encourage all of our merchants to check which version of TLS they are currently using in order to avoid any issues.

Newer versions of the TLS protocol enable more modern cryptography and are broadly supported across modern browsers.