The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Secure Website

Ratnakar Patrayudu
Marketing And Growth Hacking
6 min readJan 11, 2018

Every Entrepreneur wants to increase sales, revenue through their online approach.Where website as a gateway and social media as a platform. There is one less common way that not many people think about that can help reach this goal is a secure website with SSL encryption…which wins million hearts as trustworthy.

Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising their brand, promotions, and social media contests, and it’s money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain.

One of the first questions Google asks when evaluating the quality it’s searching results is: “Can I trust this website?”​​ Hackers don’t search each and every individual site, they go with their automatic algorithms which gives the data of unsecured sites at a whole.

HTTPS and SSL prevent hacker attacks.

Want to see how an unsecured web looks like to the middle men?

After securing your website with https here we go how it look like

The lullabot research on encryptions left us speechless

How to know our website is SSL certified or not?

The secure website consists of a green lock named secure in the left side of the URL and unsecured websites displays a red sign.

Google chrome, Mozilla firefox and many other browsers started rejecting the sites which are not secured.

Why should you move to a secure website with SSL?

1. SSL, For the privacy of your site’s visitors.

It encrypts the requests and responses between your site and it’s visitors, this protects them from a range of security issues such as a man in the middle attacks which would allow people to spy on your site users.

2.Gain trust from your users & improve conversions.

Having secure website helps instill trust with your users that you care about their security. The lack of https, on the other hand discourages people from sharing that info, reducing the chances of visitors returning to your website. Don’t believe me? Know how your website can scare away traffic here.

3.Seen the “Not Secure” warning in browsers lately?

Pages with logins, password inputs, credit cards & similar now show as not secure in the latest versions of Google Chrome & Firefox! Others will be following soon too. As announced in September, Chrome started marking non-secure pages containing password and credit card input fields as Not Secure in the URL bar. To avoid the Not Secure Warning make your website secure with https.

Google in its announcements stated the issues with not secure warnings and How to resolve them.

The following chart illustrates a range of possibilities for browser security status indicators (note that EV is a special type of HTTPS certificate that provides extra assurance, like for bank and financial sites, more about that later):

4.SEO ranking gains from Google:

You may ask Do SSL Certificates Affect Search Rankings? Google is a big advocate for HTTPS and has announced that they see it as a minimal ranking factor. After Analyzing 1 Million Google Search Results by backlinko, they stated that as a part of SEO,HTTPS has a reasonably strong correlation with first page Google rankings which plays a vital role . This isn’t surprising as Google has confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2015, and it is reasonable to assume it will continue to impact Google’s SERP in 2016 and beyond.​

5.The need for speed.

As the contribution of content in the website has a most crucial role in the seo, we keep engaging audience with long text,images and videos and visitors still expect sites to load quickly. To keep pace with these expectations,websites with TLS (SSL) enabled are now delivered faster through the HTTP/2 protocol.HTTP/2 is only available over HTTPS. Want to see this speed difference live? Check out here.

Finally the results are out!!!!

Pete Meyers from Moz reports that according to their keyword tracking tools, half of the page one search results in Google show HTTPS URLs. This is up from 30 percent of the results in July 2016. And based on this trend, 70 percent of the page one search results could be HTTPS by the end of the year.

Make your website more secure

Every one of us aware of malware and recent malware attacks on websites to seal the critical information.

What are these actually mean? Sometimes called a broad range of software that was programmed with evil intent is running on tens of millions of computers throughout the world.

These programs can capture usernames and passwords as you type them, send the data to remote websites, and even open up a “proxy” so that attackers can type commands into a Web browser running on your very computer. This makes today’s state-of-the-art security measures — like ssl encryption & malware protection. Unless the bad guys type their commands on your computer after you’ve authenticated.

The secure website should contain SSL certificate and Malware free content which actually drives the audience to your website.

If your website is already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration with the Qualys Lab tool. If you are concerned about TLS and your site’s performance, have a look at Some Myths debunking on website speed.

Don’t make the switch to HTTPS solely for SEO purposes. Starting a website from scratch? Go HTTPS.So considering all the above aspects think of “Purchasing a Secured website or Make your Existing Website Secure!!!”.

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