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 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. Secured website equals happy customers.
Whether you’re managing your own site or have someone else that’s doing it, check out how to secure your website below.
Secured Website the Automated Way
There are manual and automated ways to install an SSL certificate. The manual method is error-prone, tedious, redundant, and shouldn’t even be considered for most modern sites. For a good web design team, this is the obsolete option because there’s a better automated option.
Automated certificates can be achieved through plugins and software that 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. Additionally, these plugins and software are usually supported by a large community, making maintaining your website security easier and more streamlined.
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 chron job or use a service that auto-renews the SSL 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 SSL certificate manager and is supported on nearly every WordPress instance. Your hosting provider may provide an SSL certificate license that you can integrate with your website, but they may come at a cost.
Keep in mind that the easy part of working with automated certificates is installing them. The hard part is knowing how their installation impacts your current digital infrastructure. For instance, sites using a customer relationship management (CRM) and content management system (CMS) may require a certain protocol that isn’t an option for you SSL provider. This can cause your CRM, CMS, and website to not function to not function or even crash. In addition, the most popular SSL provider 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 security expert like Uplancer.
Shortening the Security Gap
When figuring out what’s best for your website, you could spend days making mistakes through trial and error. But at what cost? A downed website, customers complaining, and/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.
