In this day and age, everything online is a target for hackers. That’s why having an SSL certificate installed on your website is a basic requirement for your website security.
Security
With added security, SSL certificates also help with search engine rankings as a website with a proper SSL certificate installed will always rank higher than non-secure sites.
For instance, Google now delists all websites that do not have a valid SSL certificate installed.
An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) creates a secure connection between a website and the visitor’s browser to ensure that all data that passes through the connection is private and secure.
That means all the data is encrypted during transmission between your website visitor and the server where your website is hosted.
Do I need to buy an SSL certificate?
The answer is no. Any company trying to sell you an SSL is looking to make a quick buck. There are many great hosting companies that provide free SSL certificates bundled into their services.
EV certificates
There’s also a third option when it comes to SSL certificates called an EV certificate (Extended Validation). Big businesses used these certificates to prove their authenticity by going through a long and tedious process of verifying their business ownership and paying high fees for this type of SSL.
Only a handful of certificate authorities are able to validate EV certificates, so it was considered the most trustworthy SSL certificate on the web.
That’s until Apple decided that these don’t protect users as intended as customers don’t take visual cues when entering personal or credit card information, so they completely removed EV UI from their Safari browser. Both Google and Mozilla followed suit and removed the EV markers from their browsers in Chrome version 77 and Firefox version 70, so we can confirm that EV certificates lost their importance since browsers no longer show if a website has a regular or EV certificate.
Even a security industry veteran Troy Hunt (owner of the www.haveibeenpwned.com website) agrees and declared EV certificates dead in his blog post.
