First impressions are lasting ones. That’s why you want to make sure that there’s nothing standing between your visitors and a seamless entry to your website. Browsers and domain owners have a pretty good working relationship — browsers inherently want to keep website users safe and website owners want to keep their customers secure to avoid getting a reputation for security breaches, which would drive visitors to a competitor with better security. One way browsers protect Internet users is to indicate whether or not a website uses encryption technology to secure customer data – like user names and passwords, credit card information and, for Google, any information that would be put into a form and sent to a company’s server. That’s why browsers, especially Google, throw up bold warnings indicating to users when a website is not secured by HTTPS. Websites use SSL to avoid greeting visitors with warnings like these.

Have you ever noticed the padlock in your web browser’s address bar? SSL/TLS is the technology that creates a locked padlock indicating that any data transmitted on that website will be encrypted. Let’s look at how to use SSL to avoid browser warnings:

“S” is for Secure

SSL/TLS certificates put the “S” in HTTPS leaving websites without the “s” for secure increasingly in the dust when it comes to giving users confidence to visit a website. This trend progressed throughout 2017 when a post on the Google Security Blog alerted domain experts that as of “January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.” The need for SSL/TLS increased when the Chromium Blog let us know that any website that used any forms that collect data would be subject to the same user warning, “[I]n October 2017, Chrome will show the “Not secure” warning in two additional situations: when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode. “Here’s why using HTTPS is important for websites, using an EV certificate protected and a “bad SSL” website as examples.

Secure Website in Google Chrome