The safety certificate Maple makes it possible to secure the browsing of the Internet user on a website, as well as his exchanges.
What is a safety certificate?
The safety certificate Maple is used to encrypt data exchanged on a website. In other words, it certifies that the data transmitted through a form, for example, is not compromised.
There are free certificates and paid certificates.
The free SSL certificate, usually Let’s Encrypt, is provided by your host. Just activate it and then install it. If the host has not set up automatic renewal, it must be renewed every three months.
The fee SSL certificates are numerous. They correspond to different levels of confidence, based on the verifications carried out to obtain this one. These certificates are generally paid annually.
An SSL certificate, what for?
The first role of a certificate is to secure the data of your visitors. This data can be of several types: credit card number, website identifiers, contact form sent, etc.
An e-commerce website offering payment on its site and not on a third-party platform, such as must have a paid SSL certificate. On the one hand, this allows him to inspire confidence and it promotes the purchase. On the other hand, the stakes are real and not doing what is necessary can constitute professional misconduct.
A showcase website, or one offering payment on tools external to the site, should logically refer to a free certificate.
Because the second role of a certificate is to please Google, so as not to lose visibility. Simple request from Google in 2014, the SSL certificate has become in 2017 an important element
Appears on a site without a certificate, when an Internet user fills in a form field. This affects most websites, which usually have at least one contact form. And this is only the beginning of hostilities, Google wanting to secure the entire Internet during 2018. Soon this “Unsecured” mention could appear by default, and the traffic of a website without a certificate could drop sharply.
The implementation of a safety certificate Maple on a website can be described in three stages. You have to activate the certificate, put it in place, and update third-party tools.
Activate the certificate
Most serious web hosts offer the free Let’s Encrypt certificate. By connecting to the manager / cpanel / management interface of the host, you have the possibility to activate SSL for a particular domain name. Often times, this is done with one click.
Install the certificate
More technical, the installation of a certificate on a dynamic website consists first of replacing all the links on the site starting with HTTP by links starting with HTTPS.
This work is generally carried out by intervening directly on the database. This includes the pages, the media (images, documents…), but also the various scripts present in the code of your page, which are loaded automatically with the page (the CSS sheets, JavaScript…), and of course, the interface site administration.
As long as all the links are not replaced, the proposed padlock is red or gray, and the word Secured does not appear.Then, the installation of the certificate consists in carrying out redirects. Indeed, all your visitors must use the same version of your site. You shouldn’t have one site with HTTP and another with HTTPS, just as you shouldn’t have one site with www and one without www.