So you have custom domains enabled for your SaaS application. Awesome! This means your users can fully whitelabel your SaaS product (which tends to lead to more product upgrades for you). However, this means you now need to ensure that your users’ custom domains have SSL enabled – and powering SSL for a SaaS company’s custom domains has never been an easy task. Â
SSL for SaaS solutions don’t always come out of the box ready to deploy. In almost every case, adding SSL provisioning to a product involves a long sprint on the product roadmap to develop the UI over the infrastructure.
The alternative is not provisioning your own SSL certificates, which means that your users wind up having to make a second stop in their onboarding process. It’s not surprising then that about 60% of domains don’t have an SSL certificate at all. Luckily, Entri uses Let’s Encrypt to make domain connection and SSL provisioning one seamless, native user experience.
Through the use of Let’s Encrypt as a certificate authority, Entri is able to offer native, fully whitelabelable SSL provisioning with an out-of-the-box UI.
SSL is a technical process most end users don’t understand
Today’s web developers are, ironically, often not devs. No-code products and WYISWYG website builders have ushered in a whole generation of non-technical platform users.
It’s incredible – it’s democratizing tech. It’s opening up access to careers and entrepreneurship. But it’s also leaving a lot of non-technical users to deal with technological concepts that they have no familiarity with.
The reality? Many users are struggling to figure out how to set up SSL, and most aren’t doing it at all.Â
The landscape of SaaS today has made it more important than ever to make onboarding one seamless user experience, from account setup to DNS configuration, all the way to provisioning for SSL. It simply costs too much to acquire users to let complex onboarding deter from full product adoption.
Let’s Encrypt Is Now Entri’s Certificate Authority
Entri is proud to announce our use and sponsorship of Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet more secure for all. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority, or CA, which means that they’re trusted to verify the security and trustworthiness of domains.
The team at Entri has been hard at work developing an SSL for SaaS solution that builds upon Let’s Encrypt’s stellar reputation for keeping the internet more secure, with a user-friendly solution that’s virtually plug and play for SaaS products.
Here’s how it works:
Point your custom domain record to Entri.
Have your users add your CNAME record (Hint: Entri Connect makes this easy).
Provision the SSL certificate either via the Entri modal, or an API call.
The business case for a better SSL experience
When we talk about making SSL provisioning easier for end users, we’re not just making a case for usability – SSL can have an impact on your users’ SEO and site performance.
Google penalizes unsecure websites by deprioritizing in search results. Users without SSL certificates for their websites will see an impact to their ability to drive traffic, and that’s by design.
On top of the impacts of SSL to your users’ SEO, sites without an SSL certificate will also display the warning splash page for new visitors, requiring them to continue to click ahead after viewing a security warning. This can result in severe dropoff for your users, and much lower pageviews and conversion rates.
We already know that domain-connected users have better retention rates and overall product adoption in SaaS applications. Not supporting automatic SSL provisioning in your application could result in user frustration, and ultimately, higher churn rates.
SSL for SaaS just got a lot simpler
Entri Connect’s API for DNS configuration has already made it easier than ever for users to connect their domains to products. Now, with Secure, users can configure their DNS records and set up their SSL certificate in one seamless user experience.