SSL Secure

Google wants to make the internet more secure

Improve your SEO ranking

Google is starting to place a greater importance and as a result, a greater weighting in their indices on fully secure websites. In the past, your website only needed to have SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption technology, otherwise know as the lock in the browser bar on the Checkout pages of your website. This was done because adding SSL to every pages would slow down the performance of the websites because every page is both encrypted and decrypted on the person’s browser. In a world where micro-seconds in performance improvement can be critical, this meant that SSL was an overhead that was only added where it was absolutely needed, on payment, login and pages containing personal details.

What’s changed?

On Wednesday, August 6, 2014, Google’s Webmasters Blog announced “Security is a top priority for Google” but more importantly they said “We want to go even further….. ‘https everywhere’ on the web.” They went on to say, “we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.”

What next?

  1. Investigate how to make improvements to your SSL quality score .
  2. Buy a better quality SSL certificate with more features. It make a difference to your customers. The security credibility of SSL certificates are almost all the same, however, your customer’s perception is crucial in whether they choose to buy. SSL features customers look for include:
    • changing the browser bar to green,
    • your business name in the browser bar,
    • a date/time stamp from a security organisation
  3. Setup the online store to use SSL across all pages not just the checkout & payment pages.

It won’t cost a lot but it can make the difference to your customers when they are deciding whether to buy online from you or your competitor.

What is SSL?

Don’t know what SSL does? Here’s a quick laymans ways of explaining how it works.
SSL is a technology which takes the content from your on computer and encrypts it before sending it over the internet. It uses an encyrption key which is unique to each website or domain. Once it reaches the destination, the content is decrypted and voila, your information is kept secure which it bounces around from server to server across the internet.

For more information about a fully SSL secure site, contact us.