What is SSL? A Definitive Guide to Digital Certificates

SSL certificates are important as more and more online payments and transactions become commonplace. The need for security has increased for both users and the website owner. With the number of hacking incidents continuing to rise, it’s essential that your website employs the proper security tools to protect your WordPress website from hackers. Understanding SSL Certificates is a really important part of protecting your website. These certificates ensure the company info in the certificate details field is legit, stopping fake websites from pretending to be authentic so people can trust the sites they visit more.

For merchants, SSL certification indicates their commitment to protecting customers’ financial information. With SSL, your website establishes a secure channel for data transmission, making it nearly impossible for unauthorized parties to intercept or tamper with the information in transit. As a result, personal details, login credentials, and payment information are all safe from hackers. You’ve likely seen the padlock symbol or the HTTPS acronym next to a website’s URL while browsing. These symbols indicate that the connection between the browser and the website server is secure.

Ensuring the login process is secure

Only the server, possessing the corresponding private key, can decrypt this session key. When visitors connect to a secure website, they can browse, shop, and interact confidently. The message will likely spook your visitors and send them fleeing from your site, resulting in a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate will mean a lower ranking, which will mean less traffic. Less traffic means you’ll have fewer visitors, which means fewer leads, and so on and so forth.

Remember, a safer web experience begins with an SSL certificate, and you, as a website owner, must provide it for your online audience. The best place to get cheap certificates is from a reliable reseller like SSL Dragon. We’ve got you covered with a wide range of options to suit your needs, from basic to advanced security features. Our SSL certificates ensure first-class protection without breaking the bank. SSL isn’t just about data security but is also crucial for meeting various regulatory and compliance requirements in the digital landscape. Businesses operating online are required by law to protect sensitive customer information.

How to perform a HTTPS redirect on your WordPress site

For customers and users, an SSL certificate helps establish a secure connection between their browser and your website’s server. This adds another layer of data encryption that will protect sensitive dev ssl certificate information such as passwords and credit card details. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, an internet security protocol that authenticates a website’s identity and creates an encrypted connection.

Domain-validated certificates don’t display as much information in your visitors’ browser bar as EV SSL and OV SSL certificates. They stop short of displaying information about your business, only showing the https before your website’s URL and the padlock icon. The web has evolved such that businesses now store sensitive information like medical records and social security details online. That data represents a treasure trove for cybercriminals and identity theft perpetrators hunting for websites with lax security standards.

How to enable SSL for Shopify

Other than a lower search ranking, your site risks being outed as carefree about its visitors’ safety if it doesn’t have an SSL certificate. This article will answer all your questions about SSL certificates, including the available types, why you need one, and how to install one on your website. If anything goes wrong with your free certificate, then you’re out of luck, even if the fault lies on the CA’s end. Those who opt for paid certificates, they come with warranties that can pay anywhere between 10 grand to over 1 million.

Also, please bear in mind that the time it takes to obtain an SSL certificate varies depending on the type of certificate you decide to get. Whereas you can obtain a domain-validated certificate in minutes, an extended-validation certificate can take as much as a week or more to acquire. Your SSL certificate will require configuration on your web host’s server or your personal one (i.e., if you’re self-hosting your website).

Easy WordPress Security

Instead, the actual protocol that is used is determined by your server. Which means that even if you think you installed something called an SSL certificate, you’re likely actually using the more up-to-date and secure TLS protocol. As we’ll explain, they’re also commonly used to confirm the authenticity of a website to a web browser, allowing SSL to establish an encrypted connection. This particular type of certificate is known as an “SSL certificate,” or a “TLS certificate” — but more on that later. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, our user-friendly platform ensures a seamless experience from start to finish.

HTTP and its successor HTTP/2 are both application protocols that underpin how information is transferred around the Internet. They’re essentially the foundation for data communication on the Internet. When you add back the S, it simply becomes Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (or HTTP over TLS or HTTP over SSL). This type of verification leaves a detailed paper trail providing customers with recourse should fraud take place while transacting on that website. That’s why we’ve streamlined our ordering system, making it easy to purchase and install your cert.

How to Get an SSL Certificate?

As the image below shows, Google’s Chrome browser will give your site’s visitors visual cues that tell them it’s not secure. Finally, if your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it’ll give visitors a bad user experience, which, as you may or may not know, is becoming more and more important in SEO every year. To answer that question, we’ll need to understand how SSL works.

• Organization validation covers everything involved in domain validation, in addition to authenticating certain information about the owner (such as name and address).
• You need to set up WordPress so that your URLs read HTTPS instead of HTTP.
• SSL certificates ensure everything from login credentials to online transactions remain private and safe from spoofing, phishing, and other kinds of attacks.
• Whereas you can obtain a domain-validated certificate in minutes, an extended-validation certificate can take as much as a week or more to acquire.

Paul is a cyber security expert specializing in PKI solutions and website security. He is often in front of his computer, trying to break into a website or API for clients and writing about it to improve the safety of others. He is a published author with his books on PKI Solutions and SSL/TLS Certificates, a Fire Fighter with his local brigade, and an avid snowboarder in the winter. In the section below, we’ll briefly discuss the determining factor for choosing a certificate type for your website and how to install one.

In addition, search engines like Google use the presence or absence of an SSL certificate to determine how well your website ranks. And the absence of an SSL certificate can impact your visitors’ user experience through off-putting visual cues. Compared to OV SSL and EV SSL certificates, domain-validated certificates provide a moderate level of protection from domain attacks. The verification process isn’t as stringent, so these certificates offer basic encryption. In 2014, Google stated on its blog that it would use HTTPS as a ranking signal.