SSL

SSL Secure Sockets Layer. https.

SSL adds an extra layer of security under website. Back in the day, if you had an e-commerce website, especially if you are collecting credit card numbers, it was important to have an SSL certificate offering a secure transaction for your customers.

If you just had a blog or some other type of website where you were not selling anything, most people did not consider SSL to be necessary, or even desirable.

Well, sometime back, as I recall, I would say 3 to 5 years ago, Google started including SSL in its ranking algorithm. If you had SSL, you would be a higher ranked website than if you did not have SSL.

I do have several e-commerce sites, but none of them collect credit card data. In the past, all of my e-commerce websites passed the customers over to payment sites such as PayPal, or 2Checkout. Those sites have SSL, and sensitive customer data was only collected on those other payment sites.

A while back, I decided to switch my payment gateway, and I am now using Stripe is my primary payment collection method. With Stripe you must have an SSL certificate.

So, with making the payment gateway switch in mind, I started doing research about SSL certificates. I found some great information and was able to install SSL on all of my websites (both e-commerce sites, and blogs) rather painlessly, and at a very low cost.

I did run into a few technical glitches doing this, one of which I only figured out yesterday. I have that fixed now though, and I believe that all of my sites are working smoothly under SSL now.

I will be sharing a couple more articles on the topic of SSL this week here on Ways to Make a Living website. I hope that you’ll come back and read more in the coming days. I will be telling you what providers I used to make this rather painless, and inexpensive change, and I will also be telling you what kind of results I have seen since using SSL. To be honest, the results surprised me a great deal.

See you soon!