Always secure your website with an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL is the backbone of our secure Internet and it protects sensitive information as it travels across the world. Even if it’s not handling sensitive information, like passwords and credit cards, SSL provides privacy, critical security and data integrity for both your websites and your users’ personal information.

An SSL certificate is a recognised assurance that your website is authentic and that any personal data entered through it will be encrypted so that it cannot be intercepted by malicious third parties.

SSL encrypts sensitive information between the web server and the visitor. In addition to encryption, a proper SSL certificate also provides authentication. This means you can be sure that you are sending information to the right server and not to an imposter trying to steal your information.

We all know that online data security is a serious issue. SSL certificates play a big part in keeping your website safe and secure.

Reasons to be protecting websites with an SSL certificate:

• Encrypt any information sent through the web page
• Instils customers with trust and helps to validate that your website is owned by you
• Satisfy PCI Compliance requirements
• Improves your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) score for a better search engine ranking
• Reduce the risk of visitors being blocked when visiting your website

SSL certificates are becoming the standard. In an initiative to make the internet a more secure place, Google has started to rank websites with SSL certificates higher in their search results. Web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, have also started alerting users when a website they are visiting is not secure, with further intentions to phase out non-secure http websites in the future.