You can’t win business without earning someone’s trust. When doing business through a website, you’re at the mercy of browsers and search engines. They encourage websites to have valid security credentials, comply with local rules and regulations, like in the United States, and respect data privacy. Search engines do these in a couple of ways:
- Search engines penalize your insecure site in search results. Your site will appear lower on the search results for relevant keywords.
- Browsers make it easy for customers to decide whether to view your company by showing the dreaded message, “This site is not secure” screen. This simple, yet powerful screen identifies when businesses fail to secure their website data, forces customers to consent to potentially exposing their customer data. Yikes!
Long story short, you must rely on your web design and development team to take those extra steps to install a valid SSL certificate on your server.
Whether you’re managing your own site or have someone else doing it, check out how to secure your website below.
The Solution: Secure Your Website the Automated Way
There are manual and automated ways to install an SSL certificate. The manual method is more error-prone, tedious, and redundant, and shouldn’t even be considered for modern sites. A good web design team would avoid this obsolete option because there are better automated options.
Automated certificates can be achieved through plugins and software, which can be installed on your website with the click of a few buttons. They are quicker and more reliable and can be managed by non-technical people – looking at you, marketers! Additionally, these plugins and software are usually supported by a large community, making it easier and more streamlined to maintain your website.
Since SSL certificates have expiration dates, you have no recourse but to renew them before they expire. The moment you forget to renew your SSL certificate is when you start losing customers. Therefore, have your web developer set a cron job or use a service that auto-renews the SSL certificates, such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).
You’ve Got Options to Get Security Right
Depending on your tech stack, you may use Let’s Encrypt to secure your domain and subdomains. Let’s Encrypt is an open-source SSL certificate manager that is supported on nearly every WordPress instance. Your hosting provider may also provide an SSL certificate license that you can integrate with your website, but it usually comes at a cost.
When working with an SSL certificate, the easy part is installing it. The hard part is knowing how their installation impacts your digital infrastructure. For instance, sites using a customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) may require a certain protocol that isn’t available for your SSL provider. This can cause your CRM, CMS, and website to break in functionality or even crash.
Shortening the Security Gap
When figuring out what’s best for your website, you could spend days making mistakes through trial and error, experiencing downed websites, customers complaining, and/or lost business. Or you can consult with website security experts like Uplancer to secure your site. No matter what your chosen tech stack is, we can secure it.
The Bottom Line
Security is always a priority for every website. It can make or break your customer’s first impression of your brand. Whether you secure your site manually or in an automated way, you must implement a solution that not only works best with your chosen tech but also lasts. Remember, security is not a one-size-fits-all approach, so be mindful of it’s impact on your CRM, CMS, and other third-party services.
Connect with Uplancer today to help secure your website in the automated and right way.
