WPEngine free SSL is an important thing to have for just about any website, and so we figured that we ought to explain why. Your current WordPress site may not be SSL-secured, after all, and you should not put it off any further.
WPEngine Free SSL: What is SSL?
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is used to establish an encrypted connection between multiple areas, including the web server and/or website and the client and/or browser. SSL is one of the biggest security standards in place for the web industry, having earned that status thanks to the high quality put into it. SSL works by providing a certificate containing information about your site and your domain name, alongside the authority who issued the certificate in the first place and a date of expiry. Basically, using SSL and being certified is one way to show users that their connection to your site is secure, and that they do not need to worry about losing private information by working with you.
How WPEngine Free SSL is Offered
WPEngine offers free SSL by working with Let’s Encrypt, one of many certification authorities that work to make HTTPS ubiquitous by offering SSL certificates for free. Their one goal is to make a safer web for everyone to use, so they do this altruistically and are funded by donations. We will not dive too deep into all the complexities behind them and what they do in this article, so do not worry about getting lost in this tangent. Fortunately, thanks to WPEngine, we do not even have to! With WPEngine, the entire process is automated for you and auto-renewed before their expiration, meaning users will never visit your site to discover that it is not secured with SSL!
And yes, even though you may not have heard of or understood SSL until now, users will know if you don’t have it. Do not think that you can sneak it past them!
Why SSL is a Necessity
A long time ago, browsers did not care too much about whether or not a site was secure. But as technology evolved, security concerns evolved along with it. As a result, all modern browsers look for a site’s SSL certification and display it for the users next to the URL. SSL certification is needed in order to show that a site can prove that it is the site it looks like (as opposed to, say, a hijacked page or a phishing site), giving users can have peace of mind. When a user browses onto a site that isn’t SSL-certified in Google Chrome for example, the browser will outright block them from continuing, warning them that their connection to this site is not secure. While a user can still choose to bypass this restriction, most will act in their best interests and turn back instead of taking risks with their data.
These notices can come up for legitimate sites that do not have SSL properly configured, or for ones that simply forgot to renew them before they expired. Even in those cases, these incidents can be devastating to a site’s livelihood. As such, any website owner should be using WPEngine free SSL (or another way to get SSL) to avoid that situation.
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WPEngine free SSL is a valuable asset to anyone trying to start up a website. Without it, you may find that traffic to your website has dwindled.
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