Do I Need an SSL Certificate for My WordPress Website?

We see these types of questions all the time: “Do I need an SSL certificate?” “do I need SSL for my WordPress website?” and “Do I need SSL for my website?”

The answer to all three? Yes!
Anyway, let’s talk about why you need an SSL certificate for your WordPress website.

Why Do I Need an SSL Certificate on WordPress?

HTTPS is No Longer Optional — It’s Mandatory

Let’s start out with why you must have an SSL certificate; then we’ll talk about why you SHOULD have one on your WordPress website. As of July 2018, ALL websites are required to have an SSL certificate installed and be served via HTTPS. Not complying with this requirement results in the browsers putting an ugly “Not Secure” warning in your visitors’ address bars.

Not only is such a tacky message unfashionable, it’s also a real traffic killer. The browsers will also warn people if they try to input text into a text field on a non-HTTPS website. That kills conversions. And when traffic and conversions die, that kills websites. Don’t kill your website.

Compliance Demands It

Regardless of where you are, you’re likely beholden to some sort of regulation. And almost categorically, all modern data security standards require organizations to use encryption for data in transit. They’re written to be technology neutral. But make no mistake about it — the only way to accomplish this is with an SSL/TLS certificate from a trusted certificate authority (CA).

We probably don’t need to remind you that non-compliance comes with plenty of penalties. Regardless of whether it’s GDPR (EU), PCI DSS (international payment card industry), HIPAA (US healthcare), FIPS (U.S. non-military government agencies), ISO (international), CCPA (California consumers, US), PIPEDA (Canadian citizens) —all of these acronym regulations require you to secure your internet connections.

SSL Certificates Secure Your Connections

Internet connections are not secure. That’s actually by design. When they created the internet, it wasn’t being used for commercial business, so secure connections weren’t really a priority. Nowadays, that couldn’t be further from the case. Securing connections is now essential.

Here’s why, on the way to connecting with your intended destination, your connection routes through dozens of other points. You have no way of knowing that all of those points have been secured. And if you’re not using SSL, the data being transmitted to and from your website is being sent through all of those points in plaintext. This article is being written in plaintext. So, obviously, data passing through in plaintext is trivial to steal.

SSL certificates facilitate encryption. Now instead of all that data being transmitted in plaintext, it’s being encrypted before transit and decrypted upon arrival. To anyone that’s eavesdropping it all just looks like gobbledy-gook.

Now, think about the data you transact with every day. Personal data, financial data, healthcare information – anything of value. Even information that may not be valuable to you might be valuable to someone else! Regardless, it needs to be protected. Not just from the standpoint of “it’s the right thing to do,” but from a compliance standpoint, too.

Even If You Don’t Collect Personal Info, You Still Need SSL

Beyond the whole “Not Secure” warning, there’s one other reason you need an SSL certificate even if you don’t collect ANY personal information or sensitive data: You need to secure your login page.

Everyone needs to log in to their own WordPress website. After all, how else would you update it? Well, if that page isn’t encrypted, then it would be pretty easy for a hacker to sit there and wait for you to come along and enter your credentials. Now your website is compromised. And it’s all because you didn’t encrypt that page and sent your login ID and password via plaintext.

So, even if you don’t think you need an SSL certificate — you do.

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. We can get help you add HTTPS security to your WordPress website and have put together a helpful step-by-step guide that will walk you through the process. And if you don’t already have an SSL certificate, we can help with that as well.