My website designer / host is pushing for us to sign up for SSL certificate .. upfront of £200 then £50 per year
Do I need SSL if its just an 'information' website and not one that has any interaction or trade ? , or is it just a money for nothing add on for my provider ?
from my provider :
Did you look over the email sent regarding the SSL certificate? As explained its not forced uopn you but like all websites Google want to prevent fraud/online hacking and loss of privacy data that can be intercepted at any point. The rewards are outlined below if you choose to have the SSL applied to your website. It also protects any customers/clients who deal directly with you through the website
As promised here is a quick email outlining the benefits of having an SSL Certificate on your site.
· It secures your site for you and your customers, all data going through the site will be protected.
· Your current rankings on your SEO will be retained or may go higher, if you don’t have the certificate Google will penalise your site and you will lose rankings.
· Your website will move on to a faster more protected server meaning the loading speed will increase.
· Google will flag your site as unsafe if you do not have the certificate, but with the SSL will mark your site as a safe site to visit.
I understand it is a pain as the algorithm released with this change literally went into play yesterday, however it has some major benefits that will only lead to you generating more business.
£200 + vat to have the SSL applied and then £50+vat per year to renew per site, but it’s up to your business whether you have it, this is something out of our hands but its been rolled out across the UK
I can't see why you would want to make it SSL as it just encrypts the traffic sent 'over the web'. If you were collecting customer information or taking their payments you would want a secure site so you encrypted the traffic between your server and their device. If they are only reading your information which needs no logon to get to, from a data security perspective, I can't see the benefit.
If you care where you are on google rankings then it may be worth it to maintain your position if they are now going to favour https over http sites. This article seems to cover the basics - http://www.newicon.net/why-ssl-certificates/
The funny bit I find is their statement of it moving to faster servers when running https. Of course that is probably just to compensate for it taking longer anyway. With http the transmission is not encrypted. With https it needs do encrypt before sending then decrypt at the other end so by default https is slower than http. And does it really matter if the servers running your website are faster as potentially anyone reading your site may be limited by the speed of their broadband or spec of the device they are using.
There is an SEO benefit, which is pushed down from Google. All things considered it is probably a good thing.
You can get free SSLs with letsencrypt.com
It depends on your business requirements, but for most normal brochure style sites one of those is fine. If you're doing much more secure stuff you should have had it on SSL years ago!
£200 does seem on the expensive side, but it depends on the type of certificate and the server setup. We use a service called forge and it installs SSLs for you with one click. On older setups it can be a bit of a pain in the arse.
