Introduction

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) standard has been traditionally used to encrypt web traffic that needs to be protected, such as financial transactions (for example, credit card numbers) and sensitive information. Recently, however, we have seen an ever-increasing trend of encrypting whole sites and all related services. The use of SSLs ensures that the whole transport of information is encrypted and therefore can't be intercepted, especially, now that Google has given a small Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking boost to sites that have an SSL enabled by default. While the boost is small, Google's focus on encouraging the safe transmission of data means that this will likely increase in the future.

Thankfully, NGINX's support for the latest SSL standards and the latest transport standards, such as HTTP/2 (covered in detail later), means that it's getting easier to efficiently deploy SSL-encrypted sites.