It is very important to secure your site since it might be transferring lots of confidential data back and forth. Especially for a business or e-commerce web site, which might ask customers to enter their credit card details, it becomes mandatory to use SSL.
SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer) protocol is an industry standard for transmitting confidential data over the Internet. SSL feature includes data encryption, server authentication, message integrity and client authentication for TCP/IP connections. It creates secure connection between a client and a server, thereby effectively blocking tampering of the sensitive information.
SSL works by using a cryptographic technique that uses two keys to encrypt data a public key known to everyone and a private or secret key known only to the recipient of the message. The recipient of the message can decrypt the data using this private key.