Business Is A Tough Gig
Why I Put An SSL Certificate On My Website. Before Anyone Else Thought Of Doing It.
I am the purveyor of The Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover. Which has 400,000 customers. In 30 countries.
It was designed by my partner, Victor Pleshev, for his mother.
And is made with love and care in rural Australia by men and women who have a disability.
This gift to his mother in 1994 became an accidental business.
And for many years, I have been on page 1 of Google Australia for my most important search terms.
It’s not a spot I will willingly give up. So when Google says jump. I ask how high!
Google has again changed the internet landscape. And deemed that starting in January 2017, they will be penalising websites that ask for sensitive information, if the website doesn’t have an SSL Certificate on the pages that capture that information.
It can be a simple . . .
Name . . .
Email address . . .
Telephone number . . .
That you put on web forms to join email lists.
Or on the Contact Us page of every website when making an enquiry.
And the more serious information asked for when shopping online.
I’m a firm believer that in the not too distant future, visitors to every site will dilute this information down to a simple — if this site doesn’t have an SSL Certificate and a security lock in the browser bar when I visit any page on this site, I’m on an unsafe site.
Which is not the case at all. It’s only those pages that ask you to enter personal information that are vulnerable.
There was a time — yesterday, almost — when entering your name, email address and perhaps phone number on a page that does not have a security lock was not considered an unsafe practice.
But with internet hacking on even the most obscure website becoming a rampant epidemic, Google has considered it wise to take precautions. To protect you, my visitor.
It has ALWAYS been a requirement that a web page must have a security lock when entering credit card details. And this has been a component of my shopping cart since we offered online ordering in July 2004.
Because I have an email form on every page of my website, The Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover And Other Goodies, I have spent two weeks in January getting my site ready to incorporate an SSL Certificate that secures every page.
I have thousands of images on my site. And every single image had to be changed manually from http:// to https://.
Yes! There are programs that do this. But they’re scary. One slip. And you can destroy your entire website.
It took me 22 hours to make this manual change. But it’s done. And is a not too distant memory! One not to be repeated.
Click the i with the circle around it that now appears in your browser bar on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox when you visit a website. Read what it says. It tells a visitor that this website is not secure.
In fact, it not only tells a visitor that this website is not secure. But it cautions them against entering any sensitive information. Because it could be stolen by hackers.
The mere mention that a hacker might be lurking online, ready to pounce at the first keystrokes, puts fear into the heart of any website visitor.
I have no doubt that in the near future, an SSL Certificate over the whole site will be de rigueur. Even if the website does not ask for any sensitive information.
For now, I’m in the forefront. Most of my competitors have no security lock on their websites. Yet.
Your thoughts. When visiting websites, do you check the browser window to see if there’s a security lock?
~Carol Jones, Ironing Diva❤
Life Behind The Scenes With The Ironing Diva are my stories about how my partner, Victor Pleshev, and I created a new life out of the ashes of Australia’s ‘recession we had to have’. How did we design 8 products? And get them to market? How did we build a worldwide business from broke? How did we carve out a rural lifestyle that is the envy of our friends? And our customers? How did we create a beautiful hectare of garden out of a barren paddock sitting atop an infertile rock shelf? It wasn’t easy. But this is the business and the lifestyle that we built from scratch. The Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover And Other Goodies.
