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What SSL certificate for a website?
10/10/2015

SSL certificates come in several flavors:

The first version is free, but you still need to know how to do it; the procedure is simple but relatively indigestible and opaque for the layperson. The only small drawback is that visiting a website with a self-signed SSL certificate triggers the display of a harmless but uninviting message:

To spare visitors this particularly dissuasive step, the approval of a certification authority is needed. They can be found at all prices but, even free, by choosing the basic option, you don't really get your money's worth! It's better to avoid sites where everything is done online, especially the generation of the secret key (which risks not being secret...).

The next level, the approved SSL certificate goes unnoticed. We know who approved it, but we don't know for whom...

For a bit more, you can include the organization that requested an accredited certificate. But for visitors to see it, they'll have to look in the certificate details; it's very unlikely they will.

And to have this information displayed directly, with the famous "green bar" so reassuring, you need the top of SSL certificates: the one with extended validation:

In fact, an SSL certificate for a website serves to:

  1. encrypt exchanges,
  2. validate the site's legitimacy.

For point 1, they are all equal; the self-signed certificate, free, is perfect.

For point 2, it depends on the visitors:

To have automatic browser recognition or the "green bar", you have to pay. But contrary to a widely held idea, you pay for a real service: checking the site's legitimacy.

Even for automatic recognition, a serious certification authority will verify that the certificate requester is indeed the one who legitimately controls the domain name.

For an extended validity certificate, it's a complete investigation that verifies everything (official company registration, address, phone) and directly contacts the manager and 2 other people (requester and approver)!

Now, the SSL certificate is a criterion retained by search engines to favor the visibility of sites that have them. And with the awareness of the importance of protecting private data on the Internet, we can expect this to become almost unavoidable.

To be accompanied in setting up https access to your site, it's here:

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