Best SSL Certificate to Use
-
I am setting up an ecommerce website that will sell batteries and like most e-commerce sites we will be taking credit cards. I was exploring the different SSL certificates and providers and I was shocked at the difference in pricing. Anywhere from free to over $1000! What is really necessary and what is nice to have? Any suggestions on SSL providers?
Thanks
-
There's several different kids of SSL but it sounds like you're talking about a single domain. That narrows things down to the two most common kinds: domain validated and extended validation.
Domain validation is the most common kind of certificate. The certification authority will send an email to the administrative contact listed on the WHOIS of the domain. Typically it's a link and you click it and that's all that's involved. These are relatively inexpensive but only work for one domain or subdomain (i.e. the certiciate will be issued for www.domain.com but won't show as valid for domain.com). In this same vein, but more expensive, is the wildcard certificate, which works for all subdomains (*.domain.com).
Extended Validation is only available for corporations and you have to jump through a LOT of hoops to get one (birth certificate of one of your officers, letter of validity from your lawyer or accountant, etc.). They take some time to get but the advantage is that you get the coveted green bar (see PayPal's site for a good example).
It doesn't matter who issues the certificate. Verisign used to be a huge name in this area but not so much in recent years. You'll pay more for their name and "warranty", but I doubt anyone outside the industry itself could tell you who Verisign is, let alone what the difference is. I have two Godaddy certificates and it hasn't slowed us down one bit. Many people simply resell for another authority (i.e. GeoTrust, Comodo, etc)
The encryption itself doesn't differ between certificates. Your Private Key (the piece your server needs to decrypt the traffic) and Certificate Signing Request(CSR) will have to be at least 2048 bits in strength (industry-wide). The actual encryption between your server and your client's browser is something that is negotiated as part of the "handshake" when the connection is first made and is most likely 128 bits (although some browsers and servers can support 256 bits). One thing you will need to note is the difference between SHA1 and SHA2 (Godaddy directly asks you which you want and I'm sure the others do as well). When you look at a certificate's details in your browser you'll see who issued a certificate. If it says G2, they're using SHA2. SHA1 has some weaknesses and is being phased out. The only people who will notice the difference are people running Windows XP SP2 or earlier (running any browser, even Chrome or Firefox) and they'll get an invalid certificate warning.
Be sure that your host has plugged the Heartbleed bug or you'll expose your private keys (anyone with your private key can decrypt your traffic).
-
Most SSL providers provide the same exact service. The difference in cost is from the levels of insurance, brand name and provider of the SSL, and trust factor of the badge. For example, you can buy a SSL from GoDaddy right now for around $70. As far as I can see it offers no insurance against identity or infomation theft. If you want a SSL from Verisign, its around $1000 and offers a $1,250,000 warranty. Most people know the verisign badge, and trust that their information will be encrypted and secure. When you purchase an SSL from them, you also get daily malware scanning and other features.
It really boils down to what are you getting the SSL for, if you require the additional insurance, what other features you would like to have, and if you think the badge will be the deciding factor of conversion for your users. If I remember correctly, the more expensive SSL's use a different bit rate. For example 128 bit vs 256 bit.
Hope this helps!
-
Hello Jimmy, I hope this answers you. There are a lot of SSL Certificate offers that I have seen so far and as a Marketer and a developer, I have implemented a lot of SSL Certificates. I will highly recommend you start with a Minimal SSL Certificate either from RapidSSL, GeoTrust or Comodo since they are cost effective.
I just ordered an SSL Certificate from Iwebhub. Check them out too.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is the best way to handle annual events on a website?
Every year our company has a user conference with between 300 - 400 attendees. I've just begun giving the event more of a presence on our website. I'm wondering, what is the best way to handle highlights from previous years? Would it be to create an archive (e.g. www.companyname.com/eventname/2015) while constantly updating the main landing page to promote the current event? We also use an event website (cvent) to handle our registrations. So once we have an agenda for the current years event I do a temporary redirect from the main landing page to the registration website. I don't really like this practice and I feel like it might be better to keep all of the info on the main domain. Wondering if anybody has any opinions or feedback on that process as well. Just looking for best practices or what others have done and have had success with.
Web Design | | Brando161 -
Google Indexing Multi-Store Best Practice
Hi Guys, We currently have a main store view and a uk store view setup with a Litespeed Redirect for our website, redirecting UK IP Customers to the UK Store. We recently noticed that we were running into some issues with Google indexing pages from the uk site as well as the main store view. With trying to avoid duplicate content, my question being: What is the best practice for google indexing the UK and Main store views? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Web Design | | centurysafety0 -
What does they use?
Hey guys, I was reading Brian's Guide to backlinking and other Quicksprout guide and I asked myself how do they use for create that pages. They are using wordpress, but what tools do they use for creating that landing pages? Optimizepress plugin? Other template builder plugin? Thank u very much.
Web Design | | Italianseolover0 -
Nav / Sitemap Question. Using a "services" page vs just linking directly to individual service page?
Okay, so our company offers video production, web design, and web marketing services. While we do offer these services individually, our goal is to get our clients to integrate these services together. Our nav is currently like so : home - about - video - web design - web marketing - blog - contact Now I've seen businesses and agencies also use a nav with a "services" button instead of listing out their service offerings (if they have more than 1, like us). The services button usually links to a category page or has a drop down with links to the company's individual services. I'm wondering if there is any benefit to having a main services page like this and linking to the individual pages off of it (video ,web design, marketing, etc). Or if we should just keep it the way we have it now (since we've already got some page authority on the individual service pages). I know this may not be the most important aspect of our site and we may be over-thinking it but any thoughts/ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0 -
Keywords in the page url for best SEO
Hello all, I am working in the keywors structure of a web and I have the following doubt: If I want to target these keywords: great food madrid and my website is: http://www.madridlive.com I do not know if I should keep either: OPTION 1: page url: www.madridlive.com/great-food-madrid or OPTION 2: page url www.madridlive.com/great-food I do not know if the search engines "understands" madrid in "madridlive", therefore I can avoid the "madrid" keyword, dicarding option 1 and going for option 2. Additionally I avoid duplication of the madrid keyword that can be seen as redundancy and also have a shorter page url. Thank you very much and sorry for such a question but I am new in this SEO field...just the excellent SEOMOZ's SEO Guide for beginners! Best regards, Antonio
Web Design | | aalcocer20030 -
How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?
Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up. In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages? Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture? I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years. Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Any advice for best practice for mobile versions of websites?
Hi Mozzers, I am looking to develop a mobile version of one of my sites and was wondering what was considered best practice for the following: Where to host it: m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile ? Is rel='canonical' enough to avoid mobile version being indexed or should I use "noindex" on mobile version? How to handle tablets? Which screen size sees mobile version? Which sees full site version? Thanks in advance Geoff
Web Design | | SEM-Freak1