I came across this tweet the other day and it got me thinking, The response from Halifax was fairly standard, If you are not submitting information to a website, ie filling in a form or logging in you shouldn’t worry about SS, The little padlock in the address bar that verifies a secure connection between your browser and the website. But is this still the case?
One of the first responses blew that argument out of the water.
Without an SSL certificate you can’t really trust that what you are seeing is coming from the site you think you are viewing, so for a bank that’s a major problem. Does the sign in button really go where you think it goes?
However, what if you are not a bank, what if you are a plumber, or gardener or nursery etc etc, does it matter to you?
Well, yes it does. Security is becoming a big player in how the search engines rank websites, given a choice between a website with SSL and one without SSL the one with will rank higher. But that’s not all, as of Google Chrome version 62 visitors to non secure websites may see the following warning.
Now consider your potential customer, what are they going to think when they see this? chances are they’ll just hit back and move on to the next site that doesn’t display the warning. This suggest that no matter what kind of website you have, whether you are a baker or a banker you probably should have a ssl certificate and considering companies like Lets Encrypt offer free SSL Certificates and many of the better hosts have this built in there really is no excuse for not having ssl, or at least not that I can think of, If you know better comment below.