What Is a professionally signed certificate?? Do I need it for my website??

Hi BHW for over a year now, I've been driving traffic to my own website, and I'm just now learning about the difference between self signed certificate, and professionally signed certificate, and mine is self signed.

Does this mean that this whole time a large number of potential visitors to my website were getting warning messages?

Have I been losing out on plenty of visitors this whole time??

From my end I never have any warning messages, but that could be because the info is saved on my phone/computer.

self-signed vs signed by an authority is your SSL certificate for SSL websites.

Your main web site shouldn't be SSL at all. SSL is only used to encrypt the data to and from the server, ie, for sensitive parts of your website. Banks for example having their online banking system over SSL since it wouldn't be very good if people between you and the bank could sniff your bank details.

For marketing you don't actually need SSL. Nothing you'll be doing will be that sensitive. Even if you have a members-only area, does it really make much of a difference if someone sniffs data from your members area? SSL is to protect sensitive personal information for your users.

Why are you suddenly concerned about this, though? What have you read that's got you worried? It may not even apply to you. If you want you can pm me your site and I'll tell you if you're using SSL or if you even need it.

well, in the 'business' i'm in, I sometimes go to visit someone else's site and notice they have a warning message when I visit it rather than just go straight to the content.

I then was checking out my hosting account, and realized all that stuff about Self Signed Certificate vs professional, and it made me panic thinking that this is what caused those other sites to give warning message, and that my site may be doing the same.

If this was true I would have unknowingly lost so much money over the last year.

So are you basically saying that Professionally signed certificated only matter if it's a data sharing website (E-commerce, etc)??

pickmeup said:

well, in the 'business' i'm in, I sometimes go to visit someone else's site and notice they have a warning message when I visit it rather than just go straight to the content.

I then was checking out my hosting account, and realized all that stuff about Self Signed Certificate vs professional, and it made me panic thinking that this is what caused those other sites to give warning message, and that my site may be doing the same.

If this was true I would have unknowingly lost so much money over the last year.

So are you basically saying that Professionally signed certificated only matter if it's a data sharing website (E-commerce, etc)??

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You're absolutely fine in that case. No need to worry. You aren't running SSL.

You visited a site running SSL with a self-signed certificate.

When it's time for you to worry about it, you'll know it. You aren't losing any traffic at all.