What Is An SSL Certificate & What Are The Advantages?

Since the new privacy legislation has entered into power, an SSL certificate on your website is now mandatory. There are quite a few companies that do not yet comply with this legislation. Does your company belong to that group? In this article, we explain what an SSL certificate is and why you want to install this on your website!

What is SSL?

SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer.” This is a method to transmit data from visitors to the website securely. Think, for example, of online purchases or transactions.

If a website does not have a secure connection, passwords or other important data can easily be retrieved. With a secure site, data can only be read by the visitor and the administrator of the site being visited.

You can see if a website is secured by the lock for the URL, as shown below.

This is quite recognizable for everyone and creates trust with the visitors. To get such a lock, an SSL certificate must first be installed.

What is an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate is therefore required to establish a secure SSL connection between user and server. This certificate ensures that all data is encrypted, but also to validate who the website actually is. You can also see this information on other websites when you click on the lock next to the URL. The certificate provides information about:

• How long is the certificate valid?
• Domain name
• Which country the certificate was issued
• Name of the company that issued the certificate
• Certificate holder
• Root certificate

When an SSL certificate is installed on a website, the “http: //” always changes to “https: //.” This is as follows.

The more expensive advanced EV SSL (Extended Validation) certificates will also show the name of the company that manages the website.

SSL required

The most important reason to consider an SSL certificate is that it is mandatory when you collect personal data. And this happens when you use Google Analytics or a contact form. There are millions of sites that do not comply with this, and this can lead to fines of up to thousands of euros.

Advantages of an SSL certificate:

1. A secure website is seen by Google as familiar and therefore easier to find in the Google search results. You can see this very well in the graphs below. There is a clear difference in the Google results and the general visibility of the website.

2. Also, the lock in the URL bar is increasingly recognized by visitors and therefore also seen as familiar. Visitors will click a website without a lock faster because it appears less reliable and the visitor does not know what happens to his data.

3. If you use Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari, you will sometimes see in the URL bar that a website is unsafe. As you can see below.

This scares visitors off, which means they are more likely to leave the site. Sometimes it is even the case that a website is not loaded by your browser.

How do you get an SSL certificate?

Since all websites go to a secure https connection at a given time, this will become the new standard. There are several SSL certificates that you can purchase for your website. These are often available from your hosting party and are automatically installed after purchase, or you have to do it yourself manually. Please note that you do not install a standard free SSL certificate, these are often not yet safe while this is indicated in the URL bar. Since installing an SSL certificate can be complex if you are not familiar with this type of work, we can also help you with this. Feel free to contact us for more information.