September 22, 2020 Essential Reasons to Secure a Medical Website with SSL

Reasons why an SSL certificate is essential to protect personal data.

In any form of business, trust is crucial when it comes to relating to the customers. It is even vital when you are in the medical field. Yes, you get to deal with a hoard of confidential medical data related to patients including diagnoses, medication, and treatment procedures. As such, it is crucial that your tech stack be secure to maintain the same trust that will get you more clients and help you avoid costly breaches. You ought to also know that cybercriminals are now placing more value on medical data. Well, you need to implement measures like using an SSL certificate to protect the online data of your patients. Here are some of the reasons why:

Make your medical website HIPAA compliant.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the regulatory standard set up to protect any sensitive consumer data from third parties’ unauthorized access. Remember that cybercriminals can steal your critical data and use it for malicious intents like selling it to unauthorized pharmaceutical players. HIPAA requires that any information about the health status, healthcare provision, and payments be classified as Protected Health Information (PHI). Depending on how your site is built, you might collect and store sensitive information on your website. To ensure that you safeguard the data, you must install an SSL certificate like EV SSL certificates as one of the measures to comply. It will secure connections and encrypt any information that is transmitted and stored there.

An SSL Certificate inspires confidence and trust.

Trust and security are the factors that motivate people to feel confident enough to provide their private and sensitive information online. Now, SSL Certificates do make websites trusted by visitors who are now wary of their security. The SSL Certificate usually has a padlock sign indicating that the website is secure. You will even get trust badges in case of advanced types of certificates. It means that the information transmitted therein is encrypted, and therefore, it is not easy for any unauthorized third party to intercept. Your potential patients will be encouraged to pass their confidential data to your medical website servers. For example, they will be quite comfortable using the website forms to share their personal details such as name, phone number, email address, credit cards, Social Security details and other critical information. The bottom line is that you will get more business with a site that can be trusted online!

Convert more visitors to customers

Talking of business, your online conversion rate is critical if you will have a successful medical business. As more patients become tech-savvy, they are increasingly becoming aware of the secure and non-secure websites to use and share information through. If your medical website is still insecure, then the chances are that the patient visiting your site will leave immediately, they are aware that they are visiting an insecure website. You can change the bounce rates and increase conversion by simply installing a cheap SSL certificate that will encrypt the data and serve as proof to the site visitors of your medical website security. Perhaps you have been getting a good chunk of web traffic but low conversion rates. It could be on issues with trust, and a good SSL can help you fix that!

Make online payments secure

Again, you might be selling products like drugs on your website. In this case, you might ask consumers to complete sensitive payment transactions via your web apps. Well, no customer or patient is ready to share their credit card number to websites that they cannot trust. Again, SSL certificates will ensure that the payment gateways are always protected. In fact, SSL is not just about making them feel safe. It is also about compliance with the payment standards for online businesses. A good example is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) standards, which lay down the accepted guidelines on how you should handle branded credit cards like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and the likes. Once you implement the card payment security guidelines, you will protect possible breaches and cardholder data theft.  It is also a clever way to protect against business-related lawsuits that are quite common in the digital world. You will also evade possible fines from credit card institutions that are levied as punishments to PCI non-compliant merchants.

Grow your Google rankings

You certainly want your medical website to rank high on the search engine if you are to get more visitors. One of the easiest ways to do so is to install an SSL Certificate to your medical website. Although Google does not disclose the factors that go into its ranking algorithm, there is no doubt that SSL Certificate plays a huge role in the website rankings. This is especially true, given that Google has consistently made web security a priority for users online. Back in 2014, Google introduced SSL as one of the ranking signals in indexing. In other words, you will struggle to rank your medical website higher if you don’t have an SSL installed. So, switch to HTTPS is you haven’t already before you start investing in other SEO strategies.

Tip: It is crucial that you enable encryption of data across every page of your website. Remember, Google serves results on a page-by-page basis and not necessarily based on the whole website.

In a nutshell

Having an excellent website for your medical business is not enough to stay competitive online. You need to build trust and inspire the confidence of the site visitors. You can do so by ensuring the site is safe and secure from cybercriminals. One of the best places to start is to install an SSL Certificate on your website server. A good certificate will encrypt any data that is transmitted to the website and forth. From a business perspective, you will win more consumer trust online, you will rank higher on search engines, plus you will protect your business from costly data breaches!

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