SSL Certificates

The SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption-based security protocol was developed in 1995 by Netscape. Then, in 1999, SSL was updated to TLS (Transport Layer Security). It works by encrypting the transmitted data, thereby preventing anyone intercepting the transfer from reading it, as all they’d see is a garbled mix of characters.

Sites protected by the SSL certificate will show a green padlock, and have ‘https://’ at the start of the url.

A while back, Google started penalizing sites that weren’t encrypted, you may have seen this, as when the user clicks on the link from a Google search, the unprotected site wouldn’t load, and instead a yellow screen would pop up, saying that the ‘site was unprotected’.