I've noticed our company website is showing as Not Secure with the recent updates from Google, however the site still functions fine and ranks very well for our product (front page). I've noticed I can buy an SSL certificate for a yearly price of $100 roughly, will this affect our ranking positively/negatively by adding this on? Also is it really needed at all, our clients can still access the site without issue. Thanks.
Does an SSL Certificate Boost Rankings?
mreddie on 01/10/2018 - 16:46
Comments
Hi,
As many others indicated, SSL certificates can be obtained for free. As for other questions:
Does SSL certificate boost ranking? Yes. Very slightly (ref: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-s…)
Is it really needed at all? Your clients can still access the site but with an indicator on Chrome that it is not secure. The issue I see is that you might not be following the Chrome development close enough to know if Chrome announce that they will start blocking none HTTPS sites. It is thus better to implement HTTPS.
Google has stated that it has started to penalize sites without SSL.
We are running a managed Wordpress site with GoDaddy and they don't allow third party SSL I've just found out, looks like we're stuck with the GoDaddy product.
In your case you will have to purchase a SSL certificate from GoDaddy as they don't allow Let's Encrypt for a free SSL or you have to switch and transfer data to someone that does
You can get free SSL certificates.