Technology

How Certificate Errors Can Make Users Disappear and How to Avoid the Loss

How Certificate Errors Can Make Users Disappear and How to Avoid the Loss
Photo by Zan on Unsplash

Maintaining trust with customers is every business’ primary goal. One of the ways to maintain trust is to assure customers that it’s safe to use your website and mobile apps without repercussions. However, if you are still manually managing your digital certificates, you run a higher risk of breaking that trust. And once that trust is broken, your business may never recover fully. You can still do something about it before this happens. 

Why You Might See Users Disappear

Users have become more internet savvy in recent times. With phishing attempts and malware attacks becoming common, users have educated themselves on avoiding being victims of these cybercrimes. 

For example, a study conducted in 2013 showed that there was a 9% to 23% click-through rate to a website after seeing browser phishing and malware warnings on both Mozilla FireFox and Google Chrome. Users clicked through 33% of the time when they saw SSL warnings on Mozilla and 70.2% when confronted with a Google Chrome SSL browser warning.

Fast forward to recent times when phishing scams, ransomware, and new malware codes are evolving daily, morphing into more lucrative and fleeting crimes. Users are more wary about clicking through to a website if a browser warning appears when they try to access it. 

So, if you see many users disappearing from your website, you may have a browser warning problem caused by misconfigured or expired SSL certificates. And if those users disappear because of mistrust, they probably won’t return, causing long-term damage to your business.

How a Certificate Manager Platform Can Minimize Downtime and Maintain Customer Trust

Many businesses and industries can benefit from an automated certificate management system. However, most companies that capture sensitive information need a certificate manager platform. Look at how a certificate lifecycle management system can help these businesses.

E-Commerce Businesses

This type of business would benefit from a TLS management platform because they rely on credit card information to conduct transactions. If you’re trying to manage SSL/TLS certificates manually, there is a greater risk of more errors, leading to expired or misconfigured certificates and security vulnerabilities.

Implementing a TLS management platform will centralize your certificate management, automate the certificate renewal process, and ensure timely updates. This platform will significantly reduce the risk of expired or misconfigured certificates, ensure security stability, and minimize the downtime of websites.

Banks and Financial Institutions

Online banking services need a certificate lifecycle management system to manage the multiple certificates required for mobile banking apps, websites, and internal systems. By incorporating a certificate manager, businesses in this industry can gain complete visibility and control over their certificate lifecycle. 

They can easily monitor certificate expirations, generate new certificates, and revoke compromised ones. Automating the certificate lifecycle helps banks and financial institutions proactively eliminate the risk of security breaches and maintain high trust with their customers.

Healthcare Providers

The healthcare industry must vigilantly protect sensitive patient information while complying with industry regulations. Self-managing the lifecycles of their certificates can cost a significant amount of money and time but still result in errors, security breaches, and failed compliance audits.

An automated certificate management system will improve security and simplify compliance management by ensuring all certificates are up to date and conform to regulatory requirements with automated certificate provisioning, renewal, and revocation. 

Effectively Manage Your SSL Certificates to Avoid Disappearing Customers

A business that handles sensitive information, from credit card numbers to patient information, must effectively manage digital certificates to protect the information. By manually managing your certificates, you risk breaching your trust and relationships with customers because of misconfigured certificates or ones that were left to expire. Be sure to incorporate an automated certificate management system before that trust is breached.