If you want to run an ecommerce site or any site where you need your visitors to enter sensitive information into an online form then you will need to have a SSL certificate for your web site. This will provide your site with security and instant trust with your customers. The data sent and received by your web site will be encrypted and so becomes a lot more secure. The certificate guarantees the authenticity of the web site.

What is SSL?

SSL is the Secure Socket Layer protocol that was created by Netscape to ensure transactions between web servers and browsers. The protocol uses a certificate authority (CA), to identify one end of the transaction. The protocol uses a public key/private key pair to to ensure that data can be encrypted by one key and only decrypted by the other key of the pair. That sensitive data entered into a form in the user's browser will be encrypted before it is transmitted across the internet to the server, where it will then be decrypted and used.