Does your website really need an SSL Certificate?

source: Andrea Whitmer (Genesis framework)

published: 29 May 2019

As we all know by now, Google is giving a small rankings boost to sites using SSL. In the past month, I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of people asking me whether they should implement SSL on their sites to benefit from this supposed increase in rankings.

As someone who has recently switched to sitewide SSL after years of using it only for certain pages, my (probably infuriating) answer is, “It depends.”

SSL – Is it necessary?

If you sell products? Probably. If you’re taking credit card payments directly on your website, you definitely need SSL in place to encrypt your customers’ credit card information. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need it on your entire site; you might decide to use SSL only on store or checkout pages, for instance. If you use PayPal exclusively to accept payments, you don’t need SSL since customers aren’t paying you directly.

If you offer memberships? Maybe. If you run a membership site, free or paid, SSL might be a good idea. After all, your members are giving you their email addresses, names, and passwords, all of which they likely use on other sites. Do you really want to risk being responsible for a security breach that results in your members’ information being spread across the whole internet?