

There is also some work to do to your website in order to fully configure it to take advantage of the SSL certificate. This may cost from £10 upwards, per year. Other web hosts may charge a fee for purchasing and installing a certificate on your behalf. Usually, certificates are renewed annually, and so if you can’t remember who your certificate provider is, you’ll probably need to check your emails from a year earlier! I don’t already have an SSL certificateĪ lot of web hosts offer free SSL certificates these days – for example, our SSL certificates are free if you host your site with us. If you purchased the certificate yourself, you may need to renew the certificate through your certificate provider and then send the certificate to your hosting company so that they can re-install it. In this case, contact your web host immediately in case they have failed to renew the certificate. If your site has previously been secured by an SSL certificate, and is now showing as insecure, this suggests your SSL certificate has expired. So you need to secure your website with an SSL certificate to ensure that communications are encrypted, and there is no chance of a 3rd-party spoofing the website to pretend it is the original site. Visits to insecure sites can be intercepted by a third party, meaning that information you exchange with the website (e.g. This protects users from insecure sites by warning visitors before they are sent to the site. Most web browsers consider sites with an expired or non-existent SSL certificate as insecure, and will block or warn users who try to visit that site. If visitors are seeing a message saying your site is insecure (or are warned that the connection is not private) when they try to browse to your website, then you need to take action! So even if you don’t collect sensitive data, it is likely to be a good idea to use SSL across your entire site. Google say they now give a slight ranking boost to sites that use SSL. You should definitely have one if you collect sensitive information (e.g.

It uses https instead of http and results in the familiar padlock and green address bar in your browser. SSL ensures that traffic between server and browser is encrypted.
