That lit­tle “s” sig­ni­fies the pres­ence of a secure serv­er, mean­ing the site own­er has made the effort to pur­chase an SSL cer­tifi­cate and put in place a lev­el of pro­tec­tion for account hold­ers that secures the infor­ma­tion trans­mit­ted to the site. SSL encrypts the infor­ma­tion passed from the user’s brows­er to the website’s serv­er, mean­ing what we see as text when we type it in and then click “Sub­mit” or “Enter” becomes a ran­dom string of inscrutable let­ters and num­bers that would appear non­sen­si­cal to the human eye but are cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ed and rearranged into your pri­vate infor­ma­tion once it reach­es the secure serv­er on the oth­er end.

With­out a secure con­nec­tion, any infor­ma­tion sub­mit­ted is vul­ner­a­ble to hacks and data breach­es, adver­tise­ment pop-ups from sources unre­lat­ed to your coop­er­a­tive, and harm­ful “bugs” or mal­ware. No con­sumer wants to know­ing­ly risk their pri­va­cy, and no site own­er should neglect their duty to pro­tect user infor­ma­tion. In a nut­shell, the lev­el of secu­ri­ty that lit­tle “s” rep­re­sents is of para­mount impor­tance to any­one doing busi­ness online.

There are oth­er ben­e­fits to hav­ing an SSL-secured site beyond the obvi­ous need to pro­tect your account hold­ers’ per­son­al and finan­cial infor­ma­tion. Per­haps in your own inter­net trav­els, you’ve noticed occa­sion­al warn­ings from Google that you are attempt­ing to vis­it a site that is not secure. That’s because Google has, since 2018, tak­en it upon them­selves to alert users to poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous sites. While many of those sites may appear innocu­ous, their fail­ure to prop­er­ly secure their servers still make them vul­ner­a­ble to hacks and expo­sure of their users’ pri­vate data.

Google also now uses the pres­ence of an SSL cer­tifi­cate as a con­tribut­ing fac­tor in its search rank­ings, mean­ing a cer­tain lev­el of SEO, or Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, is depen­dent upon how secure your site is. While search results may not be a big con­cern for elec­tric coop­er­a­tives, you still want your site to be found eas­i­ly, so it is impor­tant to be aware of how much secu­ri­ty can play into that rank­ing.

Bot­tom line: A con­sumer vis­it­ing your site expects secu­ri­ty via encryp­tion, whether they see that lit­tle “s” or even rec­og­nize the impor­tance of an SSL. This is espe­cial­ly true when they are sub­mit­ting per­son­al infor­ma­tion of any kind, includ­ing names, address­es, Social Secu­ri­ty num­bers and co-op account num­bers. In the end, it is sim­ply the right thing for any web­site own­er to do, and secur­ing a site is easy and inex­pen­sive. The imme­di­ate ben­e­fit to a site user is know­ing they can trust their elec­tric coop­er­a­tive, while you can rest easy know­ing your mem­ber-own­ers and their vital infor­ma­tion are safe­ly in your care.