Hey everyone, this is Casey from BizIQ. I wanted to discuss two very useful features that you can add to your website to make it perform better. The SSL and CDN.

First let’s start with an SSL.

What is an SSL?

When someone visits your website, their browser is establishing a connection with your website’s server. This connection is often called the handshake. If an SSL is present, then any information entered by the customer, onto say, a contact form, will be completely encrypted and show up as gibberish to hackers. If this does not exist, anybody could intercept this sensitive information.

Now, even if you don’t collect very sensitive information such as credit cards or even social security numbers, it’s still very important to encrypt data because browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are rolling out features to alert users when a website they are on is not secure.

85% of users will leave websites if they know it’s not secure. So how do you know if your website is secure? Look at the URL in the upper left. If it says https before the rest of your domain name, then your site is secure. If it simply says http or nothing at all, then it does not have an SSL and any information intercepted can be viewed freely.

Now let’s talk about the CDN.

What is a CDN?

Imagine you are in New York and you want to go to McDonald’s. It would be ridiculous to ask you to travel all the way to the original location just to have lunch. So what McDonalds did, just like most franchises, they opened a store near you. So whenever you want to have McDonald’s you drive down the road for a couple minutes.

A CDN functions like the McDonald’s franchise model.

Essentially they will take your website from a central server and copy it to a network of local servers. So any website visitor will be directed to the closest local server. You can think that the direct connection or distance from one user to the server represents how long it takes for the website to load. In this case, if the server is farther way, it takes longer.

Business owners need to have websites that load quickly, not only for their customers’ sake, but also for Google, which has repeatedly said that they want to return fast loading websites. I know that this is a lot of technical jargon here, but the point is that if you can make your site secure and load quicker, not only can you rise in Google rankings, but you also provide a better experience for your customers.

Wondering how you can make sure your website is secure?

If you’re a BizIQ customer, don’t worry. We’ve already got you covered. If not, get in touch with us for a free evaluation of your web presence.