A SSL Certificate stands for Secure Socket Layer. It validates your website's identity, and encrypt the information visitors send to, or receive from, your site. This keeps thieves from spying while exchanging of information between the sender and receiver. When your website is protected by SSL Certificate, the visitor can assure that this website is trusted/secured to make any transactions or exchange an informations.

SSL Certificate are small data files that digitally encrypted with the help of cryptographic key to an important of the organisation's details. When SSL Certificate is installed on the web server, padlock is activated along with the https protocols and allowed secure connections, data transfer and logins and more.

When a certificate is successfully installed on your server, the application protocols (HTTP) will change to (HTTPS) where S stands for Secure. Depending on what type of the SSL certificate the user have purchased, either the padlock or green bar on the browser will be shown when you visit the website securely installed with the SSL certificate.
SSL Certificate is normally classified into two different types called:

Standard SSL Certificate - can be issued in minutes, but do not require an actual person to validate many details of the business. Because, they are cheaper to obtain. However, there is no information published on the issued certificate that would be needed for an Extended Validation SSL Certificate. Therefore, if a customer wishes to easily see what Certificate Authority issued the certificate, or where the actual e-commerce business is located, they must perform that research on their own. The visible indicators on the browser bar isn't turn into green color and also the legally incorporated company's name will not be displayed aside with padlock unlike the EV SSL Certificate. These indicator also works the same for OV and DV SSL Certificates.

Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificate - the highest form of SSL Certificate on the market. While all levels of SSL Certificate like EV,OV and DV provide encryption and data integrity, but they vary in term of how much identity verification is involved and how the certificates display in browsers. A website using an EV SSL Certificate activates highly visible indicators directly on the browser address bar (color turns green), namely the padlock, HTTPS, and the verified company name and country. These indicators are always changing and evolving as new browser versions are released, so we will aim to update this page regularly with new images.

How does the SSL Certificate works? - the process of cryptography is applied here with the generated private and public key with respect to the original messages. A public key is known to your server and available in the public domain. It can be used to encrypt any message. Suppose, A is sending the message to B, A will lock the message with B's public key. To unlock this message, B's private key is needed. Hence, B only has the private key to unlock the message sent from A. If the hacker tries to interrupt or hack the message before it reaches B, the cryptography code will be displayed and unable to break down the code unless the private key from B is activated.

Therefore, the SSL Certificate is really important for the website, as it gains the customer's trust on your website and helps you to protect your sensitive information such as credit card, usernames, passwords, etc. Moreover, it keeps data secure between servers and also effects an increase of google ranking of your website.