No matter the types of SEO strategies that you apply to your website, if your website doesn’t have SSL certificates installed, you will not get great search engine rankings. Not only that, but you also will not be able to get a great bounce back rate.
SSL certificates for WordPress will help to make your website reliable to search engines and visitors.
This article has been designed to make you understand what an SSL certificate is, as well as the advantages it provides to your website’s rankings.
What is SSL and why is it important?
SSL is short for secure sockets layer. This is the standard for encrypted communication between different servers, as well as browsers. Therefore, when a browser receives an SSL, it is able to interpret its certificate and therefore, verify its authenticity. After its authenticity has been verified, it means all the data that would be sent through that secure connection would be encrypted.
You’ll be able to see that the browser will display the existence of a secure connection with a little icon of a closed padlock. In addition, the browser will have an https before the URL.
Therefore, HTTP is a combination of HTTP and SSL. So, the http is the tunnel that is responsible for transmitting data, while the SSL is the security protocol that ensures that the transmitted data is encrypted. Because of that, there will not be any unauthorized access to reading, copying, as well as decrypting the communication that would be between the server and the clients.
How does an SSL certificate work?
An SSL protocol is made up of an SSL record, a handshake, a change-cipher spec, as well as an alert protocol. This ensures that data between the server and the browser is encrypted. This means that SSL protocol allows a key for encryption and decryption to be used. It also allows an authentication model to be used, that is based on the use of a private or public key.
The public key will be responsible for encrypting the data, while the private key will be used to decrypt the data. All of this happens at the layer where asymmetric cryptography keys are exchanged. These keys are the ones that are used for encryption and decryption of data.
Advantages of using SSL certificates
They are so many advantages that come with using SSL certificates on WordPress. Some of them are listed below.
Trust
As soon as website visitors see that their connection is encrypted, they automatically trust the website to be credible.
Legitimacy
Visitors generally love to stay on websites where they know that all the activity that is happening on that website is properly secured.
Security
All visitors worry about their security when they browse and take various actions online. Therefore, ensuring visitors that their information is encrypted gives them peace of mind. In fact, they will know that their data will not be accessed by any third parties or unauthorized people.