Fly on the wall

What is an SSL certificate?

SSL — Secure Socket Layer

For over 20 years, SSL certificates have been available for use. Having an SSL certificate ensures that the sensitive data of your website's visitors will be transferred over a secure network.

Despite this important component, in the early days, many end-users and organisations delayed their adoption. Mainly due to the price of the certificates and the complexity of implementation. Today, getting an SSL certificate is much easier, because there are initiatives that provide them for free and have made their installation super simple.

Why is it important to have an SSL certificate?

There are some generic business benefits to having a certificate, these include:

• Better security
• SEO advantage
• Credibility and trust

Plus it's important to remember that for some business-critical functionalities, not having a certificate will impede operations. For instance: When your Chrome browser connects to a website it can either use the HTTP (insecure) or HTTPS (secure). Any page providing an HTTP connection will cause the “Not Secure” warning to appear near the address bar.

SSL is required for PCI Compliance. In order to accept credit card information on your website, you must pass certain audits that show that you are complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. For eCommerce and activities that involve selling online, this becomes a dealbreaker.

The Fly Agency Approach

Going with the times each website crafted by Fly is equipped with a free SSL certificate issued by Let's Encrypt. It provides the modern standard of website encryption and it's trusted for most modern browsers and operating systems. In most cases this certificate is sufficient.

For more demanding cases we recommend installing Organisation Validation (OV) or Extended Validation (EV) certificates. The main visible difference is with OV and EV certificates you'll see the green bar beside the URL, displaying the company name next to the padlock. For example for an eCommerce website visitors may place less trust if you don't have a proper SSL certificate.

For Fly Agency your online security and reputation are paramount. All our digital products come with security built in and are rigorously tested.

Mateusz is head of Digital Development at Fly Agency, he has a background in internet security and is passionate about delivering outstanding web products to Fly clients.