10 Big Statistics About SSL Certificates

Top 10 statistics about SSL certificates

SSL certificates have come a long way since the adoption of HTTPS. Ten years ago, only large companies and shopping websites would use SSL certificates for encrypted data transmission, but today, all websites must be encrypted, regardless of website type and size. As more and more users share sensitive data online, it becomes critical to protect this data from being stolen.

The ultimate goal of browsers and certificate authorities is to encrypt the entire Internet. While we're not quite there yet, services like Google are already well over 90% of their traffic encrypted. To better view the popularity of HTTPS, we can look at 10 statistics of SSL certificates.

1. 157 million SSL certificates have been used on the Internet

According to data from BuiltWith, as of February 18, 2021, more than 15,760,519.5 billion SSL certificates have been detected on the Internet, which is almost double the number last year. In the United States alone, the number of certificates is as high as 50,623,999. Germany, which ranks second, has only 4,640,223 certificates.

2. 96% of the SSL certificate market share is issued by these 9 CA organizations

43.6% of websites use certificates issued by IdenTrust CA, accounting for 52.7% of the SSL certificate market share. Digicert Group is in second place with a 19.7% share, while Sectigo is currently in third place with a 17% market share. Most SSL certificate authorities, including Amazon, have less than 0.1% market share. Source: W3Techs.

3. By 2023, the SSL certificate market is expected to reach US$123.8 million

According to a report by MarketsandMarkets, the global certificate authorization market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.2% from US$57.1 million in 2017 to US$123.8 million.

4. Domain name verification type (DV SSL certificate) accounts for 94.3%

According to a report by Netcraft, domain name verification SSL certificates dominate with 94.3% share, organization verification certificates (i.e. OV SSL certificates) account for 5%, and extended verification type (i.e. EV SSL certificates) only account for 0.7%. Among them, Let’s Encrypt has issued more than 1 billion free DV SSL certificates. However, when you look at the share of traffic driven by certificate type, it becomes clear that high-traffic websites require enterprise-grade SSL certificates. 49% of the traffic comes from sites using OV SSL certificates, 37.9% comes from sites that deploy DV SSL certificates, and 13.2% of the traffic comes from sites that install EV SSL certificates.

5. 59.4% of websites do not follow best security practices

According to SSL Pulse, a dashboard used to monitor the SSL/TLS quality of the top 150,000 Alexa-ranked most popular websites, 59.4% of them do not follow best security practices for SSL deployment. Of the 137,270 sites monitored on February 4, 2021, 81,605 sites had insufficient security. Whether it's an incomplete certificate chain or a weak password, this staggering number shows why properly configuring your SSL certificate is crucial.

6. 42.9% of sites support the latest TLS 1.3 protocol

The TLS 1.3 protocol has new security features and can implement TLS handshake faster. Since its release in 2018, 42.9% of websites surveyed by SSL Labs have migrated to the latest version. Only 3.8% of websites still use the now-deprecated SSL protocol.

7. 74% of phishing websites use HTTPS

According to data from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), 74% of phishing websites used HTTPS certificates to implement security locks in 2019. The report said that in the first quarter of 2019 alone, more than half (58%) of phishing websites used valid SSL certificates, and the use of phishing campaigns and the HTTPS protocol continues to grow. This is a 12% increase from the fourth quarter of 2018. . Free SSL certificates provide phishers with an extremely easy way to make their phishing sites appear more trustworthy.

8. 85% of online shoppers abandon unsafe websites

In November 2014, GlobalSign surveyed 6,000 respondents in Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands and Scandinavia to understand common sense about internet security in Europe. The results show that 85% of online shoppers refuse to buy anything from unencrypted websites, while 82% do not visit such websites at all. Considering that seven years have passed since this survey, the current figure is expected to reach 90%.

9. It is difficult for humans to crack SSL encryption in a short time

E-commerce, corporate and government websites all rely on SSL 256-bit encryption, whose key is a 256-bit string of 1s and 0s. It would take billions of years to try every possible combination, but 1 billion GPUs would require 30% of the world's nuclear power plants to provide power, otherwise cracking encryption certificates would be just a pipe dream.

10. 82.2% of websites use valid SSL certificates

As of 2021, 82.2% of websites use valid SSL certificates, up from 17.8% five years ago. This report provided by W3Techs highlights the progress of HTTPS adoption over the past few years. Although this number is quite high in terms of proportion, the remaining 17.8% of unencrypted websites still number in the millions and still pose potential security threats to users.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, these data do illustrate a fact. The internet is becoming more secure thanks to affordable certificates and solid HTTPS encryption. However, there are still many challenges, especially with how websites configure SSL certificates. The SSL industry will continue to grow in the coming years as more services and companies migrate to internet platforms.

Recommended site searches: PHP space, free foreign space, search IP, virtual host server, overseas host rental, website IP query, domain name query, cloud host, Singapore server, server space,