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Are they going to steal my website?

Help! They said someone was going to "steal my website!"

A wonderful client of ours had a phone call from 123 Reg and she emailed us, concerned. Here’s what she said they said:
“They said that my website isn’t secure and that therefore I’m vulnerable to those wanting to “steal my website”. Also that Googleise not promoting or bumping up (or something equivalent) when searches happen because there’s no security. What do I do? “

What should she do? Tam wrote the following:

What 123 Reg is referring to is installing an SSL certificate on your site.
The SSL certificate has to be installed on the hosting space of the website, so it sounds like a sales call from their end, as they don’t even host the site.
But they are right – this should be implemented.
Not because there is someone evil out there deliberately trying to steal your website though.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is the encryption code process that sits on the hosting space of your website. It’s the thing that makes the browser bar display a secure notice and a padlock symbol in green, as well as changing http to https in the address bar in front of your website URL.
SSL Security - how it should look
The purpose is to securely encrypt all the details that are entered into any forms or fields on a website. Along with it being a GDPR requirement, if your website is not shown as secure, Google will flag it up as not secure (they started to roll this out from July this year) and your ranking could go down – this is what 123 Reg was referring to.
As you host your website with us the SSL certificate is something we can implement on our side, we just need the green light from you as it’s an additional yearly cost of £59+VAT for the certificate. The costs do very for the certificates as there are different security levels – what 123 Reg was offering seems very low to me and it could mean the certificate security level is very basic.

With us, the SSL Certificate includes:

  • Fully supported by all major browsers
  • 2048 bit encryption (the strongest on the market)
  • SHA-2 Encryption
  • Marks website as ‘Secure’ in Chrome / Firefox / Safari (Green Writing)
  • Ensures all communication between your visitors and your site is encrypted

As this is something that Google has insisted on sites doing if they don’t want to be penalised, we are offering the first year free of charge to all clients that host with us (and pay our normal hosting rates), as we felt it was unfair to charge you for something straight away that really is out of your control. So we only start invoicing for the certificate in year two!
Tamlyn emailed our client with the above explanation and she was happy, reassured, and of course, impressed with Tam’s amazing explanation.

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