Why Your Shop’s Website Needs to Be Secure
Secure websites are especially important for job shops that are increasingly under attack. Do you have an RFQ form on your website? Do you accept file uploads? Not only do these need to be secure, but you also need to instill confidence in potential parts buyers that you know what you’re doing. It all starts with your site certificates.
Security and Site Certificates
You probably know that URLs starting with “https://” are secure versus “http://” without that last “s”. Websites using HTTPS have “certificates” issued by a third party that are used to encrypt data transferred to and from a website and to help verify you’re connected to the website you think you’re connected to. This protects you against someone else sharing the coffee shop WiFi but also against a more sophisticated attacker located anywhere on the convoluted path between your computer and the website you’re visiting.
Not too long ago, buying a certificate to secure your website was an expensive add-on, typically only used for e-commerce sites. Visitors didn’t expect to see HTTPS if they weren’t entering sensitive information. But today, every website is expected to be secure. In fact, web browsers now highlight sites without a certificate as “Not Secure” and just show a small lock icon for everyone else. In other words, “secure” is now default, and it is essential for every website to have a certificate.
Level Up Your Site Security
Good news: it is now cheaper and easier than ever to secure your website. In fact, all the leading cloud providers, like Amazon and CloudFlare, offer it for free. For other web hosts, you can get a free certificate from the non-profit Let’s Encrypt. You may even be able to set this up on your web hosting control panel with a few clicks.
If you’re not sure how to set this up or if you’re looking to level up your web presence in general, we can help!
Request a demo and we can tell you about our marketing services that can get your website’s security up to snuff.
This article was written by Scott Sawyer
Scott Sawyer is Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer at Paperless Parts. He is focused on platform security and developing algorithms to quote parts more quickly and accurately, while scaling both the team and architecture. He worked on defense “big data” technology at MIT Lincoln Lab and Lockheed Martin, prior to leading the engineering team at a Boston IoT startup. Scott holds a BSEE (Villanova) and MSEE (UPenn).