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Business execution has witnessed a sea-change over the years. Most business is done online, and companies are spending heavily to enhance their website. They use newer techniques to use their website to launch targeted campaigns and signup prospects through the website. It requires them to store a vast amount of sensitive information about their prospects and customers online.
It becomes a necessity that companies secure the information stored on their web servers. There has been a significant increase in the number of successful data breaches at various companies globally. A data breach can lead to substantial loss of trust and severe penalties from the government. Therefore, businesses must install the right kind of SSL certificates to ensure data security and integrity.
What is an SSL certificate?
When you visit a website, you must have seen the padlock on the address bar. It depicts that the website you have visited is secure, and you can even undertake financial transactions with it. In addition, there are digital certificates that will ensure that the data stored in your web servers are secure.
The SSL certificate will ensure a secure communication channel exists between the visitor’s browser and the webserver. Furthermore, encryption of the information ensures that only the designated recipient can read the communication.
Interestingly, the certificates use the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol that succeeded the earlier SSL protocol. It helped to get rid of the security issues in the earlier certificates. However, the name SSL prevailed and is continued even today.
Why Should You Use an SSL Certificate?
Various reasons require you to buy and install SSL certificates. First, it helps you to ensure sensitive information remains secure. Let us discuss in detail the benefits of using an SSL certificate.
Ensures the credibility of the website.
There have been several incidents where users have been led to a malicious website through a phishing email. The use of these certificates ensures that your website cannot be used in such activities. The certificates are issued only after a recognized Certificate Authority (CA) validates the company’s documents. Moreover, it also ensures that your domain cannot be misused for any phishing activity.
If you are an e-commerce company, you are mandated to install them to allow online transactions to happen through your website. As the certificates are issued to validated companies, the user can undertake transactions through the website. The users can safely provide their sensitive information and stay assured that it would not remain safe on their servers.
Secure transmission of information.
The use of digital certificates ensures a secure channel is set up with the webserver. Furthermore, they use the latest encryption technologies that utilize the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to ensure secure information transfer. Hence, no hacker can undertake man-in-the-middle attacks to gain access to the webserver.
The company is validated by a reputed CA who undertakes checks on the documentation provided. Thus, it prevents the communication from being intercepted by any third party and ensures the safety of the data in the servers.
Improved search engine rankings
When you visit an HTTP website, you must have come across the “Not Secure” warning on the address bar. It stands as a warning that the website you are visiting is insecure. The use of SSL certificates ensures that the notification is removed, and visitors know that they are visiting a secure website. The warning also makes visitors abandon the website. An increase in bounce rate can lead to a loss in search rankings.
Since 2014, Google has been using HTTPS as a lightweight parameter during a keyword search. They have stated that if all the other parameters are the same, they will prefer a secure HTTPS website and rank them higher. The use of SSL certificates can also ensure your website loads faster. If you are worried about the cost of acquiring these cybersecurity essentials, we have got you covered. You can easily acquire cheap SSL certificate from reliable online SSL providers. They offer premium encryption from reliable CAs at hitherto unheard-of rates.
SSL and Web Page Load Speed
Higher speed transfer of data.
One of the benefits of SSL is that it uses HTTP/2 that helps in improving website performance. Using HTTP/2, the server and browser can request and then receive several web elements over the same connection. As a result, latency is reduced as the users need not wait for several messages being exchanged when trying to access.
The Server Push feature.
The HTTP/2 was created with the Server Push feature. It ensures that a server can push additional resources to the browser, and this information is anticipated to be requested in the future. The server can determine what additional assets could be required by the browser. Hence, the response rate is significantly improved.
Compressing the headers
The headers can inform the servers about the information wanted by the server and describe the resources that are being transferred. The size of the header can impact the network latency. The HTTP/2 ensures the compression of the header data for any responses and requests. The size of the transferred header data is reduced.
Other ways to ensure faster page load speeds
Using the CDN.
Are you wondering how to cater to your geographically spread visitors? You can take the help of a CDN (Content Delivery Network). It will ensure that the copies of the website files are distributed to various data centres globally. When any visitor tries to visit the website, the files from the nearest data centre are pushed to the visitor.
Caching can help too.
The caching of the content can help while you serve the visitor static HTML files. This option can help to enhance the web page loading speeds. You can also compress and minify the CSS, JavaScript, HTML.
Conclusion
The increase in the number of data breaches has led to businesses adopting several website security policies. One of them is to install an SSL certificate that will ensure encrypted communication with the visitor’s browser.
The certificates also ensure that the website loads faster. We have discussed the reasons why the certificate makes the web pages load faster. Hence, the installation of SSL certificates comes up with several benefits, and faster web pages are one among them.
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