If your business has many subdomains (i.e. sub.domain.com) then it can be inefficient to purchase a separate SSL to secure each subdomain. With Wildcard SSL certificates, you can secure many subdomains with a single certificate. This can include for example a staff/visitor control panel, email hostnames and sub categories on your website.
To see our range of premium wildcard certificates please click here.
The first purpose is to encrypt communication between the web server and the web browser of the visitor. This ensures any content being transmitted to the web server is encrypted and any malicious interception would be rendered pointless as the data would be fully encrypted with only the web server being able to decrypt it.
The second purpose of an SSL certificate is authentication. As an SSL certificate is issued by a 3rd party company, a level of validation is performed to make sure the certificate is generated only for the domain it is intended for and that you have control over. When a potential customer visits your website, their browser will automatically try to authenticate the certificate with the CA (certificate authority) to make sure any data sent to the web server is being sent to the intended target and not a spoofed server.