Having a secure website is essential for building your online trust among all your visitors and future clients. Most if not all of the trusted major browsers provide a warning for everyone visiting an insecure website to not trust the content displayed. That is additionally layered by any anti-malware or antivirus software people have installed on their machine. If they have strict rules in their settings, they will discontinue or abort connections to insecure websites that do not have an SSL certificate.
What does Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) mean and how does it work?
In other words, SSL is a security protocol that provides encryption for your website and content displayed in it. Essentially it provides a security layer that protects the content you display on your website on one hand and the visitor which connects to it on the other hand. Certificates can be provided by a Certificate Authority (CA). They need a specific code that is generated and also known as Certificate Signing Request (CSR) in order to create one.
That can be generated only by the specific server the website is located on, or from the hosting provider in other words. In most cases, the hosting service provides free or paid SSL options to the clients, depending on their package. With WPX you get FREE SSL from Let’s Encrypt which is one of the more trusted Certificate Authorities. The setup is user friendly and does not require any manual work for our clients as our system is set up with a quick-button setup and automatic renewal if the certificate is expiring.
General Issues with SSL
Like any other software, there are well-known issues that are connected to installing an SSL certificate on your website. We will go through the more popular ones on this topic. The first and most common issue upon installing a certificate is the website being pointed to a server. If you have created your website but have not updated the DNS records to point to the correct server, then the SSL certificate will most likely fail to install.
Other cases may be internal in the hosting, where if you attempted to install the certificate without pointing your website too many times, you will need to wait, even if the later on the DNS is pointed correctly. It depends on the hosting provider and the server configuration. With us, the wait time is around one hour per Let’s Encrypt rate limits.
When installing a Custom SSL Certificate or in other words, bought elsewhere or outside of your hosting provider, you need to first contact them and get the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) generated in order to complete it with the Certificate Authority (CA) and Private Key which is unique and must be configured with the specific server your website is hosted on. If you do not get the specific CSR from the hosting side to configure it properly, then the installation will fail if you try to do it. To explain the process in more detail, when you are buying a certificate outside of your hosting, it is “generic” and it is not configured to work with that specific server. To make things work, you need the CSR in order to generate a “unique” certificate that will work.
Benefits of having an SSL certificate on your website
One of the main benefits of hosting in general is that most of the providers offer Free SSL Certificate for one or more websites. WPX offers Unlimited SSL Certificates for all websites that are pointed to our servers. First thing to mention if you want to use a Commercial Certificate or buy one externally, it would cost you financially more without any real benefit or upgrade to your security compared to a free one.
Another benefit to having an SSL certificate is connected to having full security over all kinds of redirects or specific set ups that require you to have them. For example, if you have an Alias or a redirect through CNAME DNS record, you can add them to the certificate and reinstall it, so that they can be secure as well. That is technically changeling and is mostly recommended to be done by the technical support staff of the hosting provider. Our Support Team can offer help with what we mentioned earlier and provide a hassle free experience so that you can focus on your website goals and not technicalities.
Better ranking and SEO in general is a huge benefit to having a valid SSL certificate installed. Major trusted browsers make it mandatory to have unless you want to receive a warning every time you visit the website. That would be detrimental to the amount of visitors you get and affect your blog or business heavily on the negative side.
Another benefit, especially if you have an online WooCommerce site, would be a secure check-out page when clients and visitors are at ease when buying products or services that you may offer. Additionally, the same goes with website communication through contact forms. You want your contact form to be secure from automatic bot attacks and vice versa, any kind of hacking that may occur on an unsecure page, leading to sending massive spam to all your subscribers.
To sum it all up, it all boils down to trust. You need to build a solid foundation on your website with security so that your visitors know that you are serious about what you do and that you want to share a safe environment for them to be in. If you stumble upon any issues of installing a certificate on your own or have additional questions on the topic, do not hesitate to contact our Support Team with sub 30 seconds response time on chat any day of the week!
If you want to learn more about website security, check out these posts.
