Secure Server / Certificates
If you’re not familiar with it, a secure server is encrypted for traffic, meaning that the conversation between your computer and the server that hosts the website is “coded”. That means that if someone was “listing-in”, they could not understand what was being sent from one to another. Imagine someone’s punching in their credit car number or a password to a site – that’s better to have coded – yes?!
To make a site secure, a digital “certificate” is purchased and installed on the server for that website. It’s not unlike a domain name in that you pay periodically and have to renew it to keep it. Here’s one place you can buy them: https://ca.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate
This is very important to have for websites that sell and take online payments to be secure – for obvious reasons. Likewise, passworded sites (those sites with log-ins etc.) may also benefit from being secure.
an example of a site that does have a security cert and therefore encrypts the data between you, the site and the server – meaning you can enter info more safely – the lock symbol shows this and can be clicked on for more info.
A secure site does lend legitimacy to the owner/publisher as there is a verification process involved in getting the certificate. Also, Google is showing what is and what is not a secure site on their Chrome browser URL bar as of July 2018 – so the thing to consider is “will a user be turned-off if what I am showing is ‘not secure'”.
This “not secure” shows on versions of Google Chrome and means the data is not encrypted when it communicates with the server – so you should not put sensitive info in (like credit cards etc.)
