Time is precious…so who wants to burn through hours of drudgery making websites more secure? Well, in this case, we have no choice. Starting July, 2019, Google marks all sites that haven’t adopted HTTPS as not secure. To make matters worse, eventually those sites will be blocked from all visitors! Essentially, the SSL certificate just means that when people visit, they will see HTTPS instead of HTTP before your domain name.
Any hosting company worth its salt will make it relatively painless to add an SSL certificate to your website. Those who don’t end up adding hours we will need to spend purchasing the certificate and adding it through an arcane, head-scratching process to prevent cyber-criminals getting in. This has caused so much consternation that hosting companies like WpEngine and GetFlyWheel offer 1-click installations.
Here are more reasons to get an SSL Certificate:
- Protect sensitive data transmitted from and to your website, including login details, signups, address and payment or personal information.
- Trust. Your website will be displayed with a security padlock in the address bar of the browser. It means you take your website’s visitors privacy seriously.
- Google doesn’t like sites that aren’t secure…it will hurt your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
We will need to login to your hosting account to accomplish this…so please have current user/password available. The site may go down for a couple of hours while things “propagate” on the World Wide Web.
