How an SSL Certificate Can Protect Your Small Business

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Protect your small business and attract new customers with an SSL Certificate

Your small business is your life’s work. You created it, you run it, you have a stake in seeing it succeed. And all of your hard work can be undone in just a matter of seconds if you don’t take the proper steps to ensure it’s properly protected.

While an SSL Certificate won’t secure your business’ website from all threats, it’s an excellent place to start. Not to mention all the additional benefits that come from securing your site with SSL, things like looking more professional, increasing conversions and visitor loyalty and attracting more shoppers.

You may think an SSL Certificate is only about encryption—you would be wrong. SSL offers so much more.

Secure and Protect your Website and Customers

Let’s Start with Encryption

Of course, the first place to start when it comes to an SSL Certificate is encryption. An SSL Certificate both authenticates your site (more on that in a bit) and protects communication between visitors and your site via encryption.

Without encryption all communication between your website and your visitors is out in the open, unprotected. This means that any interested third party can steal or manipulate the data being sent back and forth. For your visitors this puts their personal information and banking details at risk. Chances are you’re selling something on your website, at the very least you’re asking your visitors to sign up for something. That’s where encryption comes into play. Without it, the data you’re collecting can be stolen by third parties. With it, that information is safe, capable of being decrypted by your site and your site alone.

You can’t in good faith ask your customers to send you important personal details or credit card info without giving them assurance that the information they’re sending is protected. An SSL Certificate does just that.

But encryption is more than just protecting data. It also protects you from things like Man in the Middle Attacks and third-party content injection. A MITM attack is where a third party intercepts data and alters it, this can have a number of negative effects on your site from crashing it to allowing someone to fake login credentials. Third party content injection is similar, though it usually comes in the form of third parties injecting advertising directly on to your site and affecting its integrity.

Both of these can have an adverse effect on you and your customers, and neither is possible on sites that properly use an SSL certificate.

Business Authentication

One of the other benefits of using an SSL Certificate, especially for small businesses, comes in the form of business authentication. In order for a Certificate Authority to issue an SSL cert they first have to vet the party applying for it. On lower-level certificates, this vetting simply entails proving you have ownership over the registered domain. But for Organization Validation and Extended Validation certificates – which are ideal of e-commerce businesses – it requires that the company go through a more rigorous process to prove that it is a legally registered entity in its local municipality.

This isn’t anything that should scare you away, it’s a breeze for any company with its registration information up to date, and it’s done for your benefit. You see those business details will then appear as part of your certificate. Anyone that clicks on the padlock icon in their web address bar, or on the trust seal that accompanies the SSL certificate, will get a quick snapshot of your business—and with it, assurance that they’re doing business with a real company.

Internet users are becoming increasingly vigilant online, they want to know that they can trust the companies who’s website they’re visiting. Business authentication accomplishes that. In fact, extended validation unlocks a green address bar with your organization’s name prominently displayed within it. This is an unmistakable sign that your company is legitimate.

And legitimacy means a lot in the online world. It can attract more customers and engender more loyalty from existing customers. Both of these are good news for your bottom line.

Additional Benefits of SSL

But beyond encryption and business authentication, there are even more benefits that an SSL Certificate can provide your small business. Many high-end certificates come packaged with other security products like malware scanners and daily vulnerability assessments. These carry the obvious benefit of making your site more secure in addition to offering more assurance to your customers.

Then there are site seals, the static and dynamic images that appear on home pages and checkout pages that advertise the fact that your website is secure. These have been proven to increase conversions while offering your customers even more peace of mind. Between a green address bar with your organization’s name in it and a dynamic trust seal, you could see your conversion rate increase as much as 30%. No small business can afford to pass that up.

The need for SSL on today’s internet is undeniable. There are myriad threats waiting to target your website and the success of any one of them could potentially put you out of business. But beyond that, SSL makes your company look more professional while also helping you to drive more sales.

You may be asking yourself, can I afford SSL? The better question, is can you afford not to have it?