Secure certificates

All web sites should have a Secure Certificate.  It used to be costly and difficult to add, now it’s easy and free for most purposes.  Some web service providers will encourage you to buy a commercial certificate, this is very rarely of any benefit to you.

What it means is that the traffic between your webserver and those visiting your web site is encrypted.

Web browsers like Chrome, Edge, Firefox as well as some PC security software may display some indication that a site is secure (e.g. a small padlock icon) or alert users that the site is insecure (possibly with a rather scary message) .

Google gives greater prominence to secure sites.

SSL is the technical term,  it’s probably no help to know that it stands for “Secure Socket Layer”.

You may recall that a fully specified web address might be http://www.example.com, with SSL that changes to https://www.example.com

There is no good reason not to implement SSL. Do check that the job has been done properly, any link to http://www.example.com should not give an error message but should be automatically corrected to https://www.example.com (web browsers no longer need the https://www. part of the address example.com should work and should be auto-corrected to https://www.example.com )