The Importance Of SSL/TLS For Websites

TCD is proud to announce that we are fully shifting towards SSL/TLS for our entire domain today. Almost all of the webmasters are striving towards securing their website links with this protocol because thank you Google!

It all started when the latest version of Chrome began showing websites which are accessed over the normal HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) as "Not Secure". To give an insight into all this, all the information that you enter on website pages with this protocol will pass over an unencrypted channel. Sensitive information like passwords and debit/credit card info must never be typed if a website page is in this particular protocol.

Previously, HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) was mostly used by websites which asked for sensitive information like the above. Suppose if you have to log in to a website, you will enter your email and password at a login page that is secured by that protocol. Or if you are going to make an online transaction, for that very purpose, the secure protocol will be used. Popular websites like Amazon, Facebook and of course Google have had it from almost the very beginning.

Needless to say, HTTPS increases the trust of the website in the eyes of the user and now the search engines.

TLS, in this case, stands for Transport Layer Security. To explain this, your computer or device is a client to the server on which our website is hosted. Your device will ping our server for information which will then be transported over a secure channel back to you and in order to confirm the identity of the website, your browser will request the TLS certificate. If the public key in this certificate is correct and the code on the website accesses links and scripts over secure channels, it will show secure in the address bar of your browser, like it does for our links.

However, it should be noted that if a hacker was supposedly going to target a website, SSL/TLS don't necessarily offer a big barrier against them and rather this protocol is just used to increase the safety, trust of the user and enable cryptography on a channel where the data is being transferred. It hugely depends on the server and the host, how much security they provide against attacks like these hence it would be wrong to consider yourself 100% secure from malicious attacks.

With that elaborated, I would like to say that all webmasters are simply being played by Google because an algorithm change has prompted all of us to incorporate SSL/TLS on our domains, even if it may not be required. It just goes to show how much power they have to influence most of the web to implement these new standards.