A secured website brings tons of benefits not only to online users, but to website owners also. Privacy and data protection should be prioritized at all times to prevent identity theft, fraud, and other cyber crimes. Here are 4 key benefits to learn about having a secured website.
Increased Trust
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If you want your customers to stay loyal and entice more people to transact with your site, you need to make sure that you do all the necessary measures to keep your website secure. Keep reading to learn the tools and free advice on how to make it a safe place to navigate and do business.
Here are the e-commerce security drivers to make people buy:
Trust seals or logos: These indicators may come as trust badges or secure ‘Lock’ icon of payment providers, and security partnership icons displaying ‘Verified’ or ‘Secured’ on secured websites.
Secure Sockets Layer: SSL certificate or “https:// pages” are seen on the URL. It is a digital website authentication with the ability to encrypt data sent to your server, which is a crucial part of any website to indicate that security measures are taken.
Privacy Policy: Install a Privacy Policy to reinforce e-commerce security. It refers to a website document that provides users all the necessary information about how the site gather, use, discloses, manages, and secures data provided, ensuring a peace of mind and serving as a legal document for both the website owners and online users.
Increased Traffic, Leads, and Conversions
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Website security affects your SEO, and so as its related metrics, like web traffic, leads, and conversions. Backlinko analyzed about 1 million Google search results, considering the impacts of website security to SEO.
Here are the results of the analysis of Backlinko and Moz:
1.Backlinko found out that the HTTPS has a moderate correlation on the Google search rankings.
2.Moz found minor correlations between SEO and digital security, wherein the presence of an SSL certificate can significantly improve web visitors’ user experience.
3.Statistics show that a website with SSL decreases page bounce rates. It means that having clear indicators that a website is secure makes visitors stay. On the other hand, users who feel that the site is unsafe to tend to quit browsing or leave the page.
4.Google notices a high bounce rate and may demote a website in the search engine results because people leave the site so quickly. It also tells Google that the site is not worthy of high rank, leading to decreased ranking, which means reduced traffic.
Increased Customer Engagement
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Higher click-throughs mean more traffic for your site, and having a secured website will encourage customers to stay and do business with you. Customers will leave if a website is secure because of the risk of malicious software, infecting sites to gather data, commit fraud, and hijack computer resources.
You want to keep your site safe to instill peace of mind, increase trust, and establish an excellent reputation for your website. That’s why you need to ensure website digital security to continue gaining traffic and engaging with your customers through your web content, which includes the following:
- High-quality videos
- Informative articles, press releases, news, and blogs
- Stock Images
- Infographics
- Voice Recording or Podcast
Google Incentives
According to the HTTPS encryption Google transparency report, 73% of pages are loaded in the United States in 2018, using HTTPS in Chrome on Windows from 59% in 2017. It only means that the web is increasingly becoming more secure.
Google created several incentives and penalties, encouraging web developers and website owners to enable HTTPS which makes a positive ranking signal. It changes the security warnings of Chrome for HTTP pages and sponsors the security ‘Let’s Encrypt’ certificate authority, providing free digital certificates. Also, Google provides secured websites a boost in search engine ranking.
Here are some website security tips the Google suggests:
Move your website from HTTP to HTTPS.
- Choose from the type of certificate you need including single certificate, multi-domain, or a wildcard certificate.
- Utilize 2048-bit key certificates.
- Using relative URLs for resources residing on a similar secure domain and using a protocol that is relative URLs for other domains are recommended.
- Avoid blocking your HTTPS website from crawling using robots.txt.
- Enable search engine indexing of your web pages as much as possible. Don’t use the meta tag for no-index robots.
- Track your HTTP to HTTPS migration within Google Webmaster Tools or in your analytics software.
Conclusion
Make your site a safe place for customers to enjoy reading your content, watching videos, and doing business with you. Don’t wait before you act because security breach may leave customers frustrated, which will result in a risk of losing your business.