It can be a minefield if you’re unsure as to which options are available or which type of certificate is best for your business. 

This article will show you the pros and cons of the different types of SSL’s available to help you make an informed decision based on your requirements.

What is an SSL certificate?

Secure Sockets Layer certificates (SSL), are used to create trust, privacy and identify your business online. 

They work by securing the flow of communication, through the use of encryption, between a website and internet users. 

This helps to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks on your data and acts as a deterrent to hackers by creating a secure connection between the browser and the server.

In order to get an SSL for your site, you’ll need to have your domain registered. The Certified Authorities (CA) will need to be able to verify the domain before they can provide you with a certificate.

Once you have an SSL in place, internet users can easily identify the security of your site from the padlock icon next to the URL, also known as a trust seal. Once in place, “HTTPS” (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) will also prefix your URL. Having the additional “S” at the end of HTTP denotes that the site is “Secure”.

Google wants to protect the security of internet users, and as a result, factored HTTPS as a ranking signal as of 2014. Although it’s not a high-ranking factor, it will still have an impact on SEO within your business. Having HTTPS has been shown to improve overall page visibility as well as keyword rankings.

You can check if your current SSL certificate is valid through CWCS, just pop in your domain details, here. 

When choosing an SSL certificate, you should consider the following factors:

• Domains – The number of domains and subdomains you want to secure will affect the type of certificate you require. 
• Security – What sensitive information is processed on your site and what customer data do you capture.
• Support – What level of support is offered by the SSL provider. Do they have a troubleshooting team available? Free SSL providers won’t necessarily offer round the clock support.
• Price – How much do you realistically need to invest into your SSL. Certifications can be valid for varying lengths of time so this is another element to consider. 
• Validation – The level of validation you wish to display through the certificate and what level of information this contains.
• Warranty – Does the provider have a warranty with their certificates? The higher the warranty, the more you are covered. Keep in mind that you won’t get a warranty with a free SSL provider. 
• Reputation – It’s best to obtain your certificate from reputable CA’s 
• Issuance Time – For more advanced certificates, the process will take longer as a more in-depth verification process is required – hence the higher level of trust given by these certificates. 

Encryption levels are actually the same regardless of what type of SSL you choose. The main difference is the verification process required to secure the certificate.

Different types of SSL’s

Lets Encrypt

Let’s Encrypt is an open-source organization that aims to provide a free option for website owners to secure their domains and by extension the wider internet.

Let’s Encrypt is one of the most commonly used free SSL tools. Originating in California they operate a not-for-profit service with the outlook of providing free encryptions for businesses.

These are most suited to smaller businesses with a low number of web pages and who aren’t collecting data from their customers or visitors. They also work well for testing sites, blog sites and internal non-public facing sites.

Pros

• Firstly, it’s free! Which is a great cost saving benefit to smaller businesses.
• It’s easy to install.
• You can automate renewals for sites by installing a plug-in for your control panel.
• You can benefit from a range of community support options.
• They also offer SAN certificates, Subject Alternative Name, to allow for multiple domain name protection.

Cons

• If you haven’t installed the correct plug-ins, you need to manually renew your certificate every 3 months.
• It’s important to remember, you don’t get warranty with these certificates. So, if there is an issue, you will not be entitled to receive compensation.
• You won’t have access to round the clock support due to it being open-source. Therefore, you may have to wait a while for troubleshooting and advice.
• Wildcard certificates are not available through free platforms.

Domain Verification SSL

Domain Verification (DV) SSL’s are a great option for businesses who need an SSL quickly and at little expense. DV requires the CA’s to check that the applicant has the right to use that specific domain name. 

They do this by obtaining a response from their Domain Control Validation email. However, aside from this, no other company information is checked or verified. This means that only the Secure Site Seal is displayed on the certificate along with the padlock icon and HTTPS.

Pros

• They are issued almost immediately and you aren’t required to submit any paperwork.
• They also have the same browser recognition that Organization Verification and Extended Verification have, without the time implication of setup.
• Very affordable option.

Cons

• Your company information isn’t listed on the certificate itself, meaning that essentially, anyone could register under your domain without actual proof of ownership.

Organization Verification SSL

With Organization Verification (OV) SSL’s, CA’s must validate both the domain and the business before issuing the certificate. These are an elevated version of DV. These are ideal for e-commerce sites or sites dealing with sensitive customer data. 

These essentially verify that the organization using the certificate is a registered government entity. They also check factors such as locality presence and sometimes even telephone verification.

Pros

• Issued within 24 hours.
• Displays company information on the certificate.
• Offers higher bit encryption than DV.
• For e-commerce sites or sites that manage payment details, the higher the encryption, the better.
• OV certificates are the only type which can be used to validate IP addresses where a domain isn’t registered.

Cons

• Site visitors will have to know where to look in order to find the information.
• These can still take between 2-3 days to be issued.

Extended Verification SSL

These certificates are often used when the highest level of security is required. For example, government bodies or e-commerce sites would require Extended Verification (EV) to secure trust with their users. 

EV requires the provider to verify the following information: the business has officially authorized the issuance, that they have the exclusive rights to the specific domains, that the business’s identity matches official records and that they can verify the legal and operational existence. 

It will also display the country in the address bar along with the business name. 

Pros

• They offer increased warranty and they have a higher validation level.
• It’s difficult for hackers to obtain EV certificates as it’s likely that the CA’s would notice discrepancies in the applications. 
• EV have the longest certificate length options of up to two years, unlike DV and OV who only run up to a year. 
• Having an EV shows your customers that you are doing everything you can to protect their data.

Cons

• For single domains, this is by far the most expensive option.
• The issuance time is quite lengthy and can take between 3-5 days to obtain.
• The process can also be delayed if any discrepancies are found within the documentation, thus requiring the business to provide further details and evidence.
• Google is slowly phasing out the defining indicators of EVs certificates from others.
• The green address bar no longer comes with EVs certificates.
• Research has shown that it wasn’t as effective in preventing phishing attacks as initially thought and was still subject to being copied by malicious websites.

Multi-domain SSL’s

These are designed for businesses that have multiple domains (e.g., example.com, example.net).

These types of SSL’s can also be referred to as SAN certificates as the domains themselves are listed as Subject Alternative Names. This is the best option for businesses who want to secure multiple domains they operate. 

Multi-domain SSL’s can also be referred to as Unified Communication certificates, where you have the flexibility to amend the domain names if required.  

Pros

• They can cover up to 100 domain names under just one certificate. Saving you money and time on purchasing multiple certificates.
• Users will have the ability to easily manage and change or move domains as required.
• It can be used across as many servers and IP’s as needed and most providers will offer round the clock support.

Cons

• Multi-domain SSL’s are only available with DV or OV.
• There is a risk of downtime where certificate updates are required as the certificate must be replaced on all the sites using the certificate. 

Wildcard SSL’s

Wildcard SSL’s are ideal for covering a range of sub-domains. They allow you to manage an unlimited number of sub-domains under one certificate. This is great if you have an expanding site and want the option to add more sub-domains in the future. 

Domains can fall into two categories to make them easier to manage: sub-domains and fully-qualified domains. 

For example, a wildcard SSL can protect: www.example.com, blog.example.com, shop.example.com, but will not protect example.com on its own.

Pros

• Great for businesses who are looking to scale online as they allow for easy growth and flexibility. 
• You don’t have to purchase multiple certificates and equally don’t have to go through the whole validation process over and over.
• Saves costs on having to purchase additional certificates.

Cons

• Wildcards are only available in DV and OV certificates.
• There can be compatibility issues with older operating systems.
• They also only cover one subdomain level so if you need different levels of subdomains then technically you would have to purchase one of each level which would be costly.
• If you have multiple people managing the SSL then you would have to share private key details which could increase the risk of security.
• It’s also worth noting that if you are using just one certificate across multiple servers then a single compromise will result in you having to re-issue all the certificates.

As you can see, getting SSL’s for your domains is imperative to maintaining data security and trust between your business and your online customers and visitors.

If you are still uncertain as to which would be the best option for your business, or would like advice on suppliers, speak with us today!

As businesses, we are both passionate about helping our clients grow online and that’s why we’ve produced this handy guide to support businesses and equip them with the right tools and services to stay ahead of the game.

This May, Google’s Page Experience update is coming into force so now seemed like the perfect time to share the ways in which we are helping companies to prepare.

So, What is Page Experience?

Google’s algorithm update is due in May 2021 and will use the following five search signals to measure Page Experience: 

1. Core Web Vitals

These will look at three areas; load performance, interactivity and stability.

• LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, measures loading performance and page stability. For a good user experience, the page should load within 2.5 seconds. 
• FID, First Input Delay, measures interactivity and suggests that pages should have less than 100 milliseconds of FID. 
• CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, measures the visual stability of a page and pages should have less than 0.1 CLS for good UX.

2. Safe-browsing

Google will check for any suspicious or deceptive content on your web pages. This will include checking for social engineering, malware and other malicious content. 

3. HTTPS

Previously HTTPS was a minor factor in Page Rank however, with this new update it will play a larger role. Having an SSL certificate in place will ensure data is encrypted between the server and the users web browser. This has become a defining factor of how you establish trust amongst your customers and visitors online.

4. Mobile friendly UX/UI

Assesses readable views, font sizes, click-throughs and links.

5. No Intrusive Interstitials

Ensures page content is easily accessible to users. Measuring accessibility to content, simplified mobile search results and pop-up management.

Let’s take a look at tools and services both businesses offer inline with preparing for Page Experience.

CWCS Managed Hosting

CWCS have been providing hosting solutions for the last 20 years. With a knowledgeable team behind them, they have been experts in providing an array of hosting and security solutions. 

Having the right hosting plan in place will allow your business to run smoothly online, utilising the appropriate recourses and infrastructure can impact on speed, uptime/downtime which will play a part in the Page Experience signals. 

Choosing the right type of hosting can impact your SEO so it’s important you choose the right type of hosting plan for your business. CWCS operate a full data center and are able to advise and support you with an array of hosting options:

• Managed Web Hosting – For those that require simple, affordable managed website hosting, we offer a secure, reliable and easy-to-use service for single or multi-site hosting.
• VPS – A VPS bridges the gap between Web Hosting and a Dedicated or Cloud Server, which provides you with more performance, control and flexibility at competitive prices.
• Cloud Hosting – A smart choice for customers that require reliable, flexible and scalable hosting. Built on a fully redundant platform, our Supreme Cloud is built for mission-critical systems. CWCS offers both public and private cloud hosting.
• Dedicated Servers – Powered by HPE Hardware and Intel Xeon Processors, a Dedicated Server will give you maximum performance and reliability when you need it most.
• Colocation – From our UK ISO 27001 accredited Data Centres in Nottingham, London and Manchester, we’ll provide you the ultimate environment to protect your assets and data.

SSL Certificates

With HTTPS being one of the signals for Page Experience, CWCS can help you choose the right type of SSL Certificate for your business. They have a handy SSL Certificate Checker on their site which, upon entering your domain, will quickly show if your site is secure or not.

With a range of options for DV, OV and EV certificates, you can secure your site today!

Security Solutions

Security is paramount to how CWCS operates with Cyber Essentials, G-Cloud and ISO 27001 certification in place as well as being fully GDPR compliant, you know you are in safe hands.

To ensure your systems are fully protected from attacks, you should take advantage of the security tools available:

•  Managed Dedicated Firewalls – Using Cisco’s most-deployed stateful firewall combined with application control, intrusion prevention system, and advanced malware protection (AMP), have confidence that you are protected against the most sophisticated cyber-attacks.
• Managed Cloud Firewalls – CWCS ArcusWall provides powerful, reliable and robust corporate-level firewall protection at an entry-level price.
• Bitedefender Anti-Virus Protection – Offers protection against aggressive ransomware families with advanced threat control.
• Barracuda Email Firewall – Fully integrated hardware and software solution that protects your email server from spam, viruses, spoofing, denial of service, phishing and spyware attacks.
• cWatch Web Security – Includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), Advanced DDoS Protection, provisioned over a secure Content Delivery Network (CDN). This will help prevent you from having downtime from DDos attacks on your site.

Overall, having the right hosting and security in place will give you peace of mind as well as working towards creating a good UX and Page Experience for your clients.

Adzooma

With 100K active advertisers taking advantage of Adzoomas free PPC optimization tool, the company has just launched a new feature to help you manage the mysteries of SEO.

The SEO Performance Report is designed for SME’s and businesses who are new to managing SEO. With clear and practical reports, you can now elevate your SEO and compare your performance with that of your competitors.

Alongside analyzing keyword performance and gap analysis, the SEO Performance Report will also allow you to monitor your page speed which will be crucial to Google’s Page Experience rankings.

How it works

In order to run an SEO report, you simply enter your URL, select your country and click run. If you want to compare your performance against your competitors, just add their URL as well. They’ve put together this guide on how it all works. 

When you run the performance report, you will initially see an overall score. The closer you are to 100, the better optimized your website!

The report will also give you a detailed and easy to read breakdown of the primary areas impacting your SEO.

Keyword Performance

This section of the report shows where your website ranks on search engines for the keywords you selected and some other phrases we found your website appearing for.

It will also give you recommendations on how to build a stronger position. Here, you will be able to see insightful information such as where you rank in the top 3 positions, your page 1 performance, total number of keywords and monthly traffic.

This will give you a direct percentage against the business you are comparing yours to and help you to make the necessary improvements. 

Keyword Gap Analysis

Keyword gap analysis is about identifying opportunities that you are missing out on. On one side, you’ll see keywords that only you are ranking for and on the other, you will see keywords that only your competitor is ranking for.

You will also be able to see the top 10 keywords that you and your competitor rank for making it easier to determine whether or not your important products and services being mentioned. 

Onsite SEO

The tool is great for providing SEO optimization suggestions and looks at a number of factors as well as giving recommendations on how to improve. It will even rank the necessary actions in priority order depending on which are most impactful to SEO.

Not only can you click to view more details on “what you need to do next” but it will also tell you “why it’s important” so you can improve your knowledge along the way.

Page Speed

Page Speed will be playing a key role in the Page Experience rankings and is extremely important for SEO as it impacts the user experience. It will help you to analyze cache, slow loading files, images that need optimizing and other format improvements which all impact speed.

Again, each suggestion comes with an overview to give you a better understanding of how you can manage each area going forward.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. It is, essentially, a “vote of confidence” from one site to another. When many websites are linking to your content, a search engine will generally rank that content highly for relevant search queries.

Here, you can access information on your total number of backlinks, number of linking websites and also your website authority compared with your chosen competitor. 

And what’s more, this awesome tool allows you to run 3 free reports per month as well as giving you the option to upgrade to unlimited reports if you want to run more analysis over the course of the month.

Get in Touch

To learn more about how both CWCS Managed Hosting and Adzooma can help you with online growth and SEO, visit our websites and speak with a member of the teams today!

With Google maintaining a market share of 92.47% as of January 2021, this search engine giant is in a position to pull the strings and are constantly updating their algorithms (PageRank) behind the scenes leaving marketeers with a continuous process of trying to adhere to these illusive rules. 

This is why we often hear SEO referred to as “difficult to define’’ or a ‘’mystery’’ and it’s impossible to predict what is coming next. There are 200 ranking factors which Google consider for their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and many of these are essentially out of our control.

So, what can marketeers do to stay on top of their PageRank? Well, outside of the website itself, there are a number of elements that can be maintained and controlled and a significant part of that comes down to choosing the right web hosting solution for your business. 

Key factors that hosting can have on SEO

Uptime/Downtime

Choosing the right type of hosting is essential as this greatly impacts the uptime/downtime implications for your site. Search engine spiders, or ‘’crawlers’’, are likely to visit your site several times throughout any given day and record inaccessibility due to downtime. Repeated reports of this can flag the site with Google and negatively impact page rankings.

Think about it, if your site is down for even just 1% of time over a month, that equates to 7 hours and this can have serious implications for a business, especially if you are an e-commerce site who relies on uptime for revenue.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that some downtime will occur when the hosts are carrying out essential maintenance. You can ask your hosting provider how often this is likely to occur and factor that into your decision-making process as some hosts may perform maintenance more often than others.

For managed hosting, it’s worth asking your provider if they can run an RTO/RPO (Recovery Time/Point Objective) test which will ultimately give you a realistic recovery time should your server go down. 

Aside from costly software, there are some useful free tools available to you online where you can check your website’s uptime/downtime such as IsItWP, all you have to do is enter your site’s URL, here. 

You can always ask for advice to ensure you know where you stand when it comes to managing your site’s uptime/downtime. Ideally, you want to choose a hosting provider who can guarantee 99.9% uptime which, spread across a year, only totals 8.8 hours of downtime!

Other aspects which can impact downtime include SPOF (Single Points of Failure) and security within your network. Your hosting provider should be able to offer you security add-ons which can help prevent against DDoS, malware attacks, etc. 

Speed

Standard website load time is in the region of 2 seconds and research shows that 40% of people are likely to entirely abandon your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load which could have huge implications on your overall traffic. 

Google factors this into their algorithms which detect slow page loading, which in turn, has a direct effect on your SEO.

It was back in 2010 when Google decided to factor load time into their ranking algorithms. Google saw users moving away from their search engine as a result of slow loading times and this had a monetary consequence as they were making less from their ads. 

Site speed has become so fundamental to how people perceive your business online and the trust they put in you. Slow load times and unresponsive sites do not instill confidence in your online customers or visitors. 

Shared hosting users can feel the effects of this due to their shared resources which can have a direct impact on their site.  

When choosing a hosting provider and plan, you should consider your traffic, storage and resource requirements. For faster speed and performance, VPS or dedicated servers are the best options as you have scalable RAM and bandwidth. Your hosting company should also be able to offer CDN (Content Delivery Network) which will minimize delays in loading web page content.

To check the performance of your web pages, you can use tools such as Pingdom, GT Metrix and Google’s “PSI” (PageSpeed Insights) which provides you with reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices. It will also provide suggestions on how that page may be improved.

Server Location

Where your site is hosted may also have an effect on speed and load times. When you have a shared, VPS or a dedicated server hosting plan, then your website is being hosted within your provider’s physical DC (Data Centre) meaning that the location may directly impact load speed. 

Having a distant server location can look suspect to search engine algorithms and this can filter down to SEO too. The ideal is to have a data center which is geographically close to the majority of your site visitors. For example, if someone is looking for a UK-based business or site, then those that have a UK based IP address will come higher on the SERP.

This is where a CDN can come into play as it is a geographically distributed network of data centers and proxy servers and work as a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners essentially pay CDN operators to deliver their content whilst the CDN would pay the IPS (Internet Service Provider) for hosting its servers in their DC’s.

Google search results will depend on a server’s IP address and a native server location will result in more relevant website traffic. Ultimately, choosing a local host will make it easy to target a local audience and it will eventually improve your web store’s local search engine rankings.

Shared Hosting

There has been a reasonable amount of debate as to the effects of shared hosting on SEO, especially in relation to having a shared IP address. Whilst researching for this blog post, I came across numerous articles with conflicting information as to whether or not a shared IP can really have a substantial negative impact on a businesses marketing.

Whilst some claim that a shared IP can be impacted by other sites on the network, Google employees have refuted this and said that this isn’t necessarily a factor and may only be flagged when a large number of sites on the network are spammy or deemed troublesome. 

After some extensive reading, it seems that the lines are still blurred on this topic, so instead of trying to decipher something even industry experts can’t seem to agree on, lets take a look at the elements where shared hosting can have a measurable impact on SEO.

Over time, a high bounce rate can damage your PageRanking. When using a shared hosting plan, it is worth bearing in mind that you are sharing resources amongst potentially 100’s of different websites. Alongside a shared IP address, you are also sharing bandwidth and RAM so if one of those sites has a large surge in traffic, then your site could also be negatively affected. 

Shared hosting is great for smaller websites where you have less than 1000 visitors per day. If you are looking to grow your business, have multiple web pages, high traffic volumes and increasing functionality requirements, then it is time to move away from shared hosting. You will need to upgrade to either VPS, Dedicated Servers or Cloud hosting, to accommodate your business needs. 

Other factors to consider when choosing your hosting provider

A good hosting provider will also be able to assist and advise on the following:

Support

Do you need managed or non-managed hosting? What IT resources do you have on site that would enable you to manage your server and systems? Taking a managed support package with your hosting provider is often recommended as you will benefit from the expertise, facilities and SLA’s that come with the support package.

Taking a managed support package frees up your time to allow you to get on with more pertinent projects and are generally a more cost-effective option for your business.

SSL

Secure Socket Layer certificates are a web protocol which authenticates and encrypts data across the internet. Depending on your industry, traffic, data security and hosting requirements, you will need to choose either a paid or free SSL certificate to ensure security for your site.

Nowadays, this is expected for any sites outside of single-page or simple blog sites. 

Domain names

You can retain a domain name for up to 10 years so when it’s time to renew or change, it’s important to still retain control over the old domain. You can use 301 redirects to ensure your traffic isn’t affected when you purchase a new domain.

To check availability, register or transfer a domain here.

Additional thoughts

As Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, puts it: “Host where it makes sense for you.” 

Ultimately, you want your hosting provider to be a partner to your business. They are going to be hosting and maintaining core infrastructure which impacts the day-to-day running of your operations. 

To find out what the best hosting plan is for your business, get a quote or even just ask for some advice, you can find CWCS on the Adzooma Marketplace and take the step towards improving your business’s hosting!