You can’t win business without earning someone’s trust. When it comes to trusting 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, and respect customer data. Search engines do these in a couple of ways:
- Search engines penalize your site in search results. Your site will appear lower on the search page for relevant keywords associated with your website.
- Browsers make it easy for customers to decide whether to trust your company by showing the dreaded message, “This site is not secure.” This simple yet powerful message identifies when businesses fail to secure their website data, which could potentially expose customer data.
Long story short, you need to rely on your web design and development team to take those extra steps to install a valid and indefinite SSL certificate on your server to be a reputable business. Check out how to do so below.
Secured Website the Automated Way
Let’s discuss the example of an unsecured website further. There are manual and automated ways to install an SSL certificate. The manual method is error-prone, tedious, and redundant, and shouldn’t even be considered for most modern sites. For a good web design team, this is the obsolete option.
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, allowing non-technical people to manage their sites securely. Also, a large community usually supports these plugins or software, making maintaining your website security more streamlined.
Since SSL certificates often 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. So make sure to set a reminder, have your web developer set a chron job, or use a service that auto-renews the certificates, such as AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).
You’ve Got Options for Security
Depending on your tech stack, you may use Let’s Encrypt to secure your domain and subdomains. Let’s Encrypt is open source and is supported on nearly every WordPress instance. Your hosting provider may provide an SSL certificate license that you can integrate with your website.
Keep in mind that the easy part of working with automated certificates is knowing how they work. The hard part is knowing how they impact your current digital infrastructure. For instance, sites using a customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) may require a certain protocol. Your CRM, CMS, and website can crash with the wrong configuration! In addition, you have options for website security, but the most popular choice may not be the best one for your chosen tech stack.
Before implementing a security solution, discuss your options with your web design and development team or an expert like Uplancer.
Shortening the Security Gap
When figuring out what’s best for your website, you could spend hours upon hours through trial and error, correcting your mistakes. You’ll probably get to an answer, but at what cost? A downed website, customers complaining, or lost business? Or you can consult with website security experts like Uplancer to secure your site. No matter your chosen tech stack, we have the capabilities to 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 works best with your chosen tech and lasts. 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 an Uplancer team member today to help secure your site the right way.
