Question: What happens if you have a great e-commerce website, and a great product or service but no SSL?
Answer: Not very much.
Here’s why: SSL is all about trust. Without trust people are shy about giving you their business – or their credit card information. SSL enables e-commerce websites to safely and secure conduct business without all the unnecessary drama associated with online shopping.
Some people assume that SSL is mainly about SEO, but those people are wrong. The main reason to use SSL is to establish security and trust with your customers. Period.
But wait, you may say. My website doesn’t collect sensitive personal information, or even any user information. Do I still need an SSL certificate? Yes, Virginia, you do. Because even if you don’t collect that sort of user info, you can still benefit from the ranking boost that SSL encryption provides.
Don’t believe me? Ask Google:
“Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search-ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.
See? Told ya.
But for goodness sake, if you’re going to use SSL, please, please do it the right way. You’ll waste valuable time and money if you don’t.
Google lists four easy steps to using SSL efficiently are described in detail here
In short the four steps are:
- Prepare the new site and test it thoroughly.
- Prepare a URL mapping from the current URLs to their corresponding new format.
- Start the site move by configuring the server to redirect from old URLs to new ones.
- Monitor the traffic on both the old and new URLs.
Just follow these steps according to the Google’s detailed steps in the link provided and you’ll be on your way to more secure e-commerce and better SEO results as an added bonus.
Huzzah!
