Here at Auto Ad Manager, we strive to stay on top of the latest developments in technology. We feel that by keeping our customers on the cutting edge we help them to rise above their competition, because as we all know, It’s a competitive world in the car industry. That’s why at Auto Ad Manager we have decided to implement TLS / SSL for all of our customers. This has already been rolled out to current customers and is the default for any new customers that sign up for our service.
What is TLS / SSL?
TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and is the current standard for securing connections between a browser and a server. It’s predecessor, SSL, stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it basically did the same thing. For websites, this means that all information sent from your browser is encrypted so that it is harder for a third party to read and it helps to ensure that the integrity of the data is maintained in transit. When a website is protected by either of these protocols, you will typically see a little padlock icon in your browser in the upper corner of the address bar. It is pretty much the standard used by banks, online stores, and any other website that requires security. Typically for car dealers, only pages that have sensitive data that is being transferred like contact forms or credit apps are encrypted, usually by redirecting the user to a third party website. So why encrypt the whole site? We did this primarily for two reasons:
- Google gives more authority to secure websites. This will directly impact your position on Google moving you higher on search results.
- By encrypting the whole website we are protecting all of your customers interactions with your website which provides a more trusting environment.
Why haven’t our competitors done this?
The simple answer is it’s a lot of work, especially if they have thousands of clients. Each website requires it’s own digital certificate (a special code that is created that secures communication). In addition, all of the links on the website need to point to the secure version of the site in order to not have what is called “mixed content”, parts that are encrypted and parts that aren’t. If they didn’t build their used car dealer websites this way, it will take a lot of time to fix. As an independently owned company we are able to adapt to the ever changing landscape of the internet quickly. And the great part is, there is no extra charge to our customers for this feature.
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