Does my website need an SSL certificate?

By Charlie B, Deliberate Design.

The short answer: yes. The certificate is what puts the padlock in the address bar and makes the address start with https. Without it Chrome shows "Not secure" next to your name, and some visitors leave on the spot. It used to cost money; now it is free and automatic on any decent host.

What it does

It encrypts what passes between the visitor and your site, so nobody on the cafe wifi can read what they type into your contact form. It also proves the site is at the address it claims to be.

What it costs

Nothing, on most hosts, through a service called Let's Encrypt that renews itself every few months. Some hosts still charge £30 to £80 a year for the same thing. If yours does, ask why.

How to check yours

• Open your site in Chrome. A padlock or a plain icon means fine. "Not secure" means not
• Type your address with https:// in front. If it warns about a certificate, it has expired or was never set up
• If the padlock shows but some photos are missing, the page is loading some things over the old http. That needs tidying

Why older sites lose it

The certificate renews automatically only if someone set that up. Sites from a designer who has moved on often have a certificate that expired quietly. We see this a lot, and it is a ten minute fix on a host that is looked after.

With us

Every site we host has the padlock from the day it goes live and it renews itself. If you have a site elsewhere that has lost it, we can host and look after it for £20 a month.