What is an SSL?

A method of securing information for Internet transactions and communications between client web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer / Firefox) and you website / hosting.

How do I know which SSL to choose?

Business Certificate (most popular) – a supported security certificate issues by one of the world’s largest and most trusted certification authorities for customer facing website e.g. ecommerce sites. Available for 1 year, include a site seal for your site.

Business Wildcard Certificate – a cost effective way of covering all subdomains e.g.. shop.catalyst2.com, support.catalyst2.com as the standard e.g.. www.catalyst2.com – available for 1 year.

Extended Validation Business Certificate – an upgraded version of the business SSL, allowing you to display a logo on your site, telling your customers about your advanced security this also turns the address bar green providing even more reassurance to your customers. This is similar to what banks have. Available for 1 year, includes a site seal.

Let’s Encrypt Certificate – these are SSL’s available free of charge and expire every 90 days*. These are recommended for improving the security of your site, however for ecommerce sites we do recommend a Business SSL (see more information on our blog).

Extended Validation SSLWildcard Business SSLBusiness SSLLets Encrypt
Green Browser BarYesYesNoNo
Certification length1 year1 year1 year90 days*
SSL management includedYesYesYesNo
Warranty included?$1,000,000$10,000$10,0000
Official Site Seal included?YesYesYesNo
Monitoring and managementYesYesYesNo
Established Registration AuthorityYesYesYesNo
ORDER NOWORDER NOWORDER NOWORDER NOW

How much do they cost?

1 year
Business Certificate £99
Business Wildcard Certificate £299
Extended Validation Business Certificate £499

Please note all prices are excluding VAT.

Contact us today and get it all setup / ask any questions you may have.

Order an SSL Certificate

What do SSLs do?

SSL certificates are a means of securing data sent between a website user and a server so that it cannot be intercepted by nefarious parties looking to steal information. Aside from the obvious moral and legal benefits that come from installing an SSL certificate on your website (apart from being horrifying in its own right, having customer data stolen from your website is generally very bad for business), there are a number of other benefits that come from using an SSL certificate on your website. In fact, they’re something that no commercial website operator should go without.

SSL certificates have significant benefits for your website’s performance in search engine results. If you’re hoping that people will find your site via a Google Search (and anyone running a website should be hoping for exactly that) – then you’ll want to be sure that you have an SSL certificate in place. This is because Google treats a valid SSL certificate as a signal that indicates a website is high quality. Getting to the top of the Google Search results is a constant battle between you and your competitors and you should be taking advantage of every little thing that help you to climb a little bit higher up the index. Google is only likely to increase the importance of SSL certificates when it comes to ranking signals in the future. If you don’t adopt one, the odds are that your website will fall even further behind the competition as time goes on.

The next reason to adopt an SSL certificate for your website is user trust. Again, Google is partially behind this shift. While web browsers have always indicated when websites are secure by showing a padlock on the left-hand side of the address bar, Google Chrome highlights when websites are not secure, by writing that in the address bar. At the moment, the text highlighting this is relatively faint and easy to ignore, but Google has promised that it’s going to make the warning more obvious in upcoming editions of the browser. For obvious reason, having the words ‘not secure’ displayed to everyone that logs on to your website is not good for business – especially if you’re trying to collect people’s personal details on your website (you should never even think of processing credit card details without an SSL certificate in place). Following a number of recent data breach and data loss scandals, users tend to be much more sensitive about who has access to their data and how it is secured and processed. Not securing your website is likely to hurt your conversion rate over time. Putting an SSL certificate in place is a great way to give you and your users peace of mind that their data is protected.

It’s easier than ever to put an SSL certificate in place on your website, but there are still a number of options and the right one for you will vary depending on the type and size of website that you’re running and the level of security that you and your users require. If you’d like to discuss your options and find out what’s right for your site, then give our team of website experts a call. They have years of experience in helping website owners like you to protect their customers and grow their business. We’d be delighted to hear from you and to help you put SSL security on your website.

* We do attempt to auto renew Let’s Encrypt SSLs prior to expiry however we cannot guarantee that they will renew correctly as it does depend on the code on your site. Please contact the support team if you have any queries.