SSL Certificates Philippines

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a digital encryption file that protects information sent from a browser to a server. Doing business online successfully is all about establishing trust. These certificates play a vital role in keeping consumer information like credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, email content and more, safe from hackers and other unwanted eyes.

SSL certificates were previously used primarily by sites that collected user information. Today they’re a requirement for all websites since all the major browsers now display “Not Secure’ in the address bar for any unencrypted HTTP connection. Protecting data in transit, or encryption, is one vital function of an SSL certificate. The other equally, if not more, important is identity authentication. Validation confirms for visitors there’s a legitimate entity on the other side of the connection. For ecommerce sites that process transactions, a premium solution like an Extended Validation (EV) certificate is highly recommended, since it displays more extensive trust indicators and comes with a clickable site seal for visitors to get more in-depth company and certificate details. EV certificates have been proven to increase conversions in multiple studies.

There are three different types of SSL certificates: Domain Validation (DV), Organization Validation (OV) and Extended Validation (EV). All of these certificates encrypt, but the main difference is in how much trust they add to a website. DV certificates can be issued in mere minutes, with the Certificate Authority (CA) simply validating the customer owns the domain they wish to secure. The downside to DV is it’s easy for everyone, including hackers, to get these encryptiononly certificates. In fact, according to PhishLabs as of Q3 2018, 49% of phishing websites were served up over HTTPS connections with the vast majority protected by DV certificates. So, if trust and conversion are important, DV may not be enough to give visitors complete confidence. Both OV and EV certificates require a more thorough vetting, plus enable a number of different trust icons within a browser and on a website to ensure online visitors it’s safe to make purchases and/or share information. While EV visual trust indicators look slightly different depending on the browser, they give visitors the most visible confirmation of the highest level of validation.

A standard DV, OV and EV certificate can protect one domain (both www and non-www if the certificate is generated as “www.domain.com”). However, there are multi-domain certificates available which can secure multiple domains on just a single cert, as their name suggests. Depending on the brand of certificate, a multi-domain solution can secure up to 101 total domains.

There are also Wildcard SSL certificates available. These certificates secure one main domain (www.domain.com) along with an unlimited amount of subdomains (mail.domain.com, etc.domain.com, subdomain.domain.com, etc.).