Let’s Encrypt – providing free automated SSL certificates

In August 2014 Google announced that their search engine will value HTTPS as a ranking signal. This is quite a good news for end-users meaning that they will get more secure sites in top search results. However, it’s not a very good news for owners of small or unprofitable websites, since they would have to acquire signed certificate to get their website a ranking boost.

It is not announced how much will this affect search results in the long run, it’s just known that “for now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries” and that it is not carrying as much weight as other ranking signals. High quality content is still the most important.

In order to have HTTPS on your website you need a certificate. In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate.

Soon (in September 2015), there will be a way to automatically obtain free digital certificate for your website via new certificate authority via a service provided by Internet Security Research Group, a California public benefit corporation. Service is called Let’s Encrypt and it is said to be a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit. It is backed by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan. Let’s Encryt will be free, automatic, secure, transparent, open and cooperative.

Installing and setting up a certificate with Let’s Encrypt will be done as easy as running two commands from command line.

Anyway, enough words, better watch a video 🙂