Do I need to secure my website with an SSL certificate?
Short answer, probably not, longer answer, possibly. Through my daily web journey I often see sites that need it that don’t have and sites that have it that don’t really need it(as far as I can tell). Most blogs don’t need them. All e-commerce sites need them. Here is a quick test to see if you should secure you website. If you answer yes to any of these questions you should probably look into getting an SSL certificate and securing your website.
- Do you collect and/or store any personal information from your visitors?
- Do you plan to or do you currently process credit cards? If you currently do you better have SSL!
- Do you sell anything off your website?
- Is there sensitive information on your website that you would not want people to see? (e.g. Company secrets, documents)
If you didn’t answer yes to any of these questions then you probably don’t need to secure your website but of course you always can if you choose to. Remember though, since everything has to be encrypted going to and from you web server not only will the server have to work harder but it will take longer for your guests to view the site too. If you do decide to secure your site with an SSL certificate you should try to only apply it to the sections of the site that need it so you’re not slowing down the rest of your site with useless security.
If you have any questions about this or want me to look over your site shoot me an email or post a comment below.
Just to mention…any site that requires a username and password(blogs) should by definition have a secure login. With that https before the URL your site send everything in plain text so when you login to the admin on a blog without it someone could(though no likely) grab your username and password. With that said, I don’t secure the login pages but it’s food for thought.