You have built an incredible e-commerce website for your small business that will be the major source of your income. Keeping your website safe and secure starts with having an SSL certificate. You run the risk of losing valuable business and customer information if you fail to implement strong security measures for your website. Firstly, what is an SSL in plain and simple terms?

What’s an SSL?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. The main purpose of this technology is to make sure that no one takes the sensitive data sent between two systems, preventing criminals from reading and editing any information transferred, including possibly personal information. A small padlock icon will appear to the top left of your website URL in the browser and HTTPS will be displayed as well when your website has an SSL certificate installed on the server.

Why do I need one?

Reason 1: It will show as “not secure” if you don’t!

Your website will receive a pop-up alert stating your site is not secure, which will have a negative impact on your reputation. Visitors will not invest or use your website to make purchases. In essence, you'll lose the trust you've earned. You would not want your users/customers' personal/financial information to be stolen in any way since this can harm your business's image & credibility. Secure communication between you and your users is ensured by an SSL certificate, which prevents other parties from accessing any information you exchange with them. By using this security certificate, the information is unreadable by other servers and can only be accessed by the intended recipient.

Reason 2: It protects your passwords

When you use WordPress/Joomla, where your pages can be accessed with one admin password, then having this protected is the most important thing. There are bots lurking around the web looking for password pages that are poorly protected to gain access to your website. It is not a good feeling to be logged on and find that your pages have been defaced or deleted. Hackers and cybercriminals always look for these minor loopholes in a website and use this as an opportunity to hack it. The Internet is becoming increasingly unsafe for users; therefore, it is your responsibility to protect your customers from theft and violation of their privacy.

Reason 3: Could improve your search engine optimization

SSL certificates improve your website's SEO as well. Several years ago, Google announced that HTTPS should be used as a ranking signal in its algorithm. This means that if your site is not loading over HTTPS, it may struggle to rank on the first page of Google. Even if you do all that is necessary for SEO, your website will still rank below your competitors if it doesn't load over HTTPS, sorry! Installing an SSL certificate is the only way to ensure your website loads over HTTPS.

How do I install an SSL?

Here are some links that will help you:

https://help.afrihost.com/entry/how-to-install-ssl-certificate-for-a-website-in-solidcp

https://help.afrihost.com/entry/how-to-install-an-autossl-certificate-for-your-domain-in-cwp