If you have an online store, offer online services, or have some other business where your users have to enter their credentials, then a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate is a necessary addition to your site.
There are many benefits to having your site secured with SSL. Here are a few examples:
- SSL encrypts your sensitive information
- SSL provides authentication and affirms your identity
- SSL provides a level of trust
- SSL could help with search engine rankings
- SSL is required for PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance
Think of an SSL certificate as a badge that indicates to your visitors or potential customers that the information they submit on your site is safe.
Note: SSL certificates are also vitally important for the position of your site in search results. If you do not have an SSL certificate, your website will appear with a security warning to visitors who access it via Google search results. Furthermore, recent updates to the Google algorithm confirm that sites without SSL certificates could be penalized by being excluded from search results.
Free SSL certificates
Yola provides SSL certificates for all Sitebuilder users. Here’s how Yola keeps your website secure:
- The Sitebuilder is a secure website with its own SSL certificate.
- If you publish your site to a free .yolasite.com subdomain, the site has its own SSL certificate, and you can see it published with HTTPS in its URL right from the start.
- If you publish your site to a custom domain, this, too, will have an SSL certificate by default. You don’t need to do anything else.
Therefore anyone who publishes a website through Yola gets a free SSL certificate to immediately benefit from the features listed above.