21 SSL Statistics that Show Why Security Matters so Much

Updated · May 20, 2023

We want to do everything online – from paying our taxes to ordering washing detergent with just the press of a button. However, this usually entails sharing some type of personal information.

Which leads us to the question:

How secure is the internet?

This is where Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates and SSL stats come into play. Created in the mid-1990s, digital certificates ensure the confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation of online communication across the web.

But there’s a catch:

They weren’t compulsory. Not until recently, anyway. The good news is more and more browsers, including the big players Google Chrome and Mozilla, are putting in the effort to restrict uncertified sites as much as they can. And the results are obvious – the internet is more encrypted than ever.

At HostingTribunal, we’ve collected these jaw-dropping stats to show you just how important certificates are in the online world. Spoiler alert – the numbers are huge!

Here is a taste of what’s to come:

Incredible SSL Certificate Statistics for 2022

  • BuiltWith detects 156,979,428 SSL certificates on the internet.
  • Nearly 21% of the Alexa Top 100,000 websites still don’t use HTTPS.
  • 6.8% of the top 100,000 sites still support SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0.
  • In January 2021, 89% of pages loaded in Chrome, on all platforms, were over HTTPS.
  • 93.2% of the browsing time on Chrome is spent on HTTPS pages.
  • 53.5% of sites have inadequate security.
  • 68% of websites still support TLS 1.0.
  • 95.77% of all certificates on the internet are issued by just 9 authorities.
  • 1 in 10 URLs is malicious.

That’s impressive, isn’t it? Now let’s dive head-first into the stats.

Fascinating SSL Facts

We’ll start with some of the most fascinating stats, so hold on to your hats.

1. BuiltWith has detected 176,577,458 SSL certificates on the entire internet in 2022.

(Source: BuiltWith)

That's a big increase in the number of certs from last year! There were 1,978,650 detected certificates in the top most visited 1 million sites. In the top 100,000, there were 266,218 detections, and a further 33,496 detections in the top 10,000. Most certificates were detected in US sites – 59,205,148, followed by Germany with 5,533,981 and the UK with 5,363,259. Guinea-Bissau came in last, with only 11 certificates for the entire country. 

However, the large figures in no way means that the entire internet is secure and encrypted. Far from it, in fact.

2. Nearly 21% of the Alexa Top 100,000 websites still don’t use HTTPS.

(Source: WatchGuard)

According to Watchguard’s Q3 of 2018 Internet Security Report, 20,911 of the top 100,000 sites are still going through the not-secured HTTP. Sharing plaintext via port 80, instead of connecting securely via port 443, should not be an option for a self-respecting site owner. Not according to today’s standards, at least.

Although 20%+ is a portion that should not be neglected, the good news is that things are slowly moving towards a fully encrypted internet. As far as HTTPS usage stats go, 79% adoption is not a bad number.

3. 6.8% of the top 100,000 sites still support SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0.

(Source: WatchGuard)

Another interesting take from the report is the portion of sites still supporting SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0. Despite calls from a number of different industry and regulatory bodies to ditch these versions, 6.8% of the top 100,000 sites still support them.

With TLS 1.3 already available and widely deployed, this stat comes as a surprise. The time of SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 is long gone, and relying on them for encryption can only leave your site vulnerable to threats.

4. In January 2021, 89% of pages loaded in Chrome were served over HTTPS.

(Source: Google’s Transparency Report)

Google has been gathering HTTPS stats since 2015 thanks to users who altruistically enough click on “Yes” when asked if they would like to share their browsing data. 89% was the average HTTPS traffic across all platforms in May 2021.

This is huge.

Back in April 2015, the average was a lowly 40%. The percentage has doubled since Google started collecting the data.

The figure varies across different platforms, but the average is almost 90%. Only Linux is falling behind with 77%. Chromecast has the highest percentage, reaching 97% of HTTPS-loaded pages.

5. 93.2% of the browsing time on Chrome is spent on HTTPS pages.

(Source: Google’s Transparency Report)

As with the previous stat, this is the average of browsing time across all platforms that support Chrome. We can see that it is higher than the percentage for loaded pages. Clearly, people are more likely to leave the site straight away if they find out it’s not secure.

The difference between platforms is even smaller here. Again, Chromecast and Mac are the leaders with 98% and 97% respectively. Linux is last with 86%, and both Android and Windows have around 94%.

6. 35.4% of the unencrypted user traffic to Google comes from mobile devices.

(Source: Google’s Transparency Report)

This is possibly the biggest change from last year, when over 70% of unencrypted traffic was mobile. Mobile is now actually in better shape than desktop, showing that mobile devices are finally getting the attention they deserve.

7. 53.5% of sites have inadequate security, according to SSL Labs.

(Source: SSLlabs)

SSL Pulse is a project created to continuously gather SSL and TLS stats from 150,000 websites, based on Alexa’s list of most popular sites in the world. The last published survey was carried out on August 4 2021 and included around 136,000 sites.

According to the survey, 53.5% (or 72,899 sites) of websites have inadequate security. 32.3%, received a grade of A. Another 14% of the surveyed sites deserved a grade A+, which means they have full encryption and are completely secure. A mere 0.1%, or 174 sites, were awarded grade A-.

8. 68% of websites still support TLS 1.0.

(Source: SSLlabs)

The current version is TLS 1.3. According to most experts, the best practice is not to support SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0, which are considered unsecure and susceptible to known exploits like POODLE and DROWN. The same fate awaits TLS 1.0, which is already quite outdated. Both TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are expected to be discontinued by 2021.

In fact, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) required ecommerce site owners to disable TLS 1.0 by June 30, 2018.

Going back to current SSL statistics, 68% of surveyed websites still support TLS 1.0, 1.9% still support SSL 2.0, and 7.6% keep SSL 3.0 protocols. In addition, 77.4% also use TLS 1.1. TLS 1.2 is the most used, with 95.2% of websites supporting it. As of May 2019, only 14.2% supported TLS 1.3, which should change in the recent future.

In case you’re wondering:

The percentages add up to more than 100, since many sites support several types of protocols. In and of itself, this is a cause for concern.

SSL Certificate Authorities Stats

It’s important to support encryption, but that’s not all. It’s just as vital who guarantees the validity of your certificates. With that in mind, let’s look at some stats about certificate authorities.

(Source: Censys)

Let’s Encrypt is a clear winner when it comes to SSL usage statistics. As of May 2019, the authority supported over 169 million fully-qualified active domains. What’s more, it’s responsible for 98,072 million active certificates and over 51 million active registered domains.

CloudFare is second with more than 41 million issued certificates or 12.21% of all SSL certificates. They’re followed by cPanel with 9.53% and DigiCert with 4.46%. Sectigo and GoDaddy are next with 3.15% and 2.43% respectively.

10. Let's Encrypt issued 3.16 million certificates per day in July 2021.

(Source: Letsencrypt.org)

The month was Let's Encrypt's best to date.  To put it in perspective, on January 2, 2015, the Authority issued just 5,712 certificates.

The popularity of Let’s Encrypt lies in the fact that the service is free. The goal is to make the internet a more secure place. The process is automated and the platform is open source, making it easily accessible.

11. 95.77% of all certificates on the internet are issued by just 9 authorities.

(Source: Censys)

All other certificate authorities have a market presence of less than 1%. Guess when it comes to encryption, trust is everything. These 9 authorities have proven themselves to be trustworthy and reliable.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Amazon is outside the top 9 with 0.84% of all issued certificates.

SSL Certificates Market

As browsers continue to push for total encryption, the SSL certificates market is expected to grow rapidly. Here are some Secure Socket Layer statistics to prove that.

12. The Certificate Authority market is expected to reach $114 million in 2024.

(Source: GlobeNewsWire)

According to the cited report by Zion Market Research, Certificate Authority's market value was around $57 million in 2017. Remarkably, it’s expected to double by 2024, growing at a CAGR of a little above 10.18%. And this is despite the emergence of free certificate authorities such as Let’s Encrypt.

13. The total number of certificates increased by more than 13.2 million between June 2017 and June 2018.

(Source: TheSSLstore)

This represented an astonishing 68% year-over-year growth. While Domain Validation (DV) comprised the majority or 80%, Extended Validation (EV) also grew by an impressive 21.1%.

Now, DV still dominates the market, representing 94.30% of all certificates. Organization Validations (OV) are 5% and EV are just 0.70%. However, the numbers change when we look at the share of traffic by certificate type. 49% of all the traffic goes through sites with OV, 37.9% through sites with DV, and 13.2% through sites with EV.

14. IdenTrust has a market share of 53.5% for paid SSL Certificate services.

(Source: w3techs)

Let’s Encrypt is the most popular authority with the biggest number of active certificates and most widespread usage. But when it comes to paid services, SSL statistics for 2021 say that the clear leader is IdenTrust with a whopping market share of 53.5% as of 2021. It’s a slight increase over last year.

DigiCert Group took over Sectigo for second place with a share of 19.3%. Sectigo is just behind it with 16.8%, meaning both providers increased their market shares relative to last years.

According to a w3techs survey, IdenTrust is used by 36.9% of all websites, amounting to a market share of 53.5%. This means that there are websites that do not use any encryption at all – 11.6% to be precise.

And there’s more:

17.9% of the websites included in the survey had invalid domains, 1.6% had an expired certificate, 0.2% had a certificate issued by an unrecognized authority, and 0.1% had a self-signed certificate.

State of SSL Implementation in 2022

We’re probably not gonna reach the totally encrypted-web promised land even in 2022, but we’ll get pretty close. The numbers are yet to come in for 2022, but the expectations for a safer net were very promising. Let’s see what the numbers suggest.

15. TLS 1.3 was predicted to grow over 30% by the end of 2019.

(Source: CA Security Council)

TLS 1.3 is supported by Firefox versions 53 to 63 and Chrome versions 56 to 70. At the same time, Chrome and Firefox handle between 60 and 80% of all browser usage. Large CDNs also support the latest TLS version.

But that’s not all:

The latest stats provided by Netcraft say that TLS 1.3 is supported by 6.5% of servers and is growing by close to 1 million sites per month. Combine all this information and you will see that 30% is a moderately constructed prediction at best.

16. Over 90% of the world’s HTTP traffic was expected to be secured over SSL/TLS by the end of 2019.

(Source: CA Security Council)

More and more SSL stats suggest that we’re getting closer to a 100% encrypted web. Browsers with a huge market presence, such as Chrome and Firefox, are truly putting in the effort to get us there as fast as possible. However, divergent UI policies will probably delay the whole process and cause users to suffer in the meantime.

17. 97% of all traffic to Google in India is encrypted.

(Source: Google’s Transparency Report)

India shares the first place with the UK and Japan. The next group of countries, where 95% of all traffic to Google is encrypted, consists of Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. They’re followed by France with 92%, and Russia and the US, where 91% of traffic is encrypted.

18. 90% of pages loaded in Chrome in the US were over HTTPS in May 2019.

(Source: Google’s Transparency Report)

In comparison, 4 years ago it was only 45% of pages. The rising trend is clearly noticeable among all countries included in the report. Germany is second with 89%, rising from 35% 4 years ago. France is next with 88% of pages loaded over HTTPS, followed by Russia and Mexico with 82%.

HTTPS usage stats about other browsers show the same uptrend. 78% of all pages loaded in Firefox are over HTTPS.

How Important Is Encryption?

Everyone’s talking about encryption and data protection, and this shows in the users’ preferences. Here are some numbers to ponder over.

19. 85% of online shoppers avoid unsecure websites.

(Source: GlobalSign)

What with all the fuss about data security, online shoppers are becoming pickier – and rightly so!

What’s more, browsers are constantly looking for ways to make security details about a website visible to the end user. We’ve all noticed the padlock in front of the URL, which signifies that the website is secure and any information shared over it will be encrypted. In addition, there is the Green Address Bar function for websites with an EV SSL certificate.

20. 1 in 10 URLs was still malicious in 2019.

(Source: Symantec)

This stat was featured in Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report 2019. Another interesting take from the report is the huge number of detected formjacking. This is when attackers load malicious code onto shopping cart websites to steal shoppers’ credit card details.

The outcome?

On average, more than 48,000 unique websites are compromised each year.

21. Google has been using HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014.

(Source: GoogleBlog)

Bottom line:

In order to optimize a site and make it rank higher, you absolutely have to use encryption. While this had little influence on your overall score at first, Google has stepped up its game in recent years.

With its open call for a totally encrypted web, the search giant is putting more stress on the importance of secure connection. That’s why SSL certificates have become a must for every site owner relying on Google for traffic.

Conclusion

SSL/TLS encryption has become the norm. Users want to be sure that any information they share on the web is secure, and developers are willing to provide.

Given that free SSL certificates are readily available, you have no excuse for failing to encrypt your website.

And with the combined efforts of the best certificate issuers and other tech giants, a totally encrypted internet could become a reality pretty soon.

Hope you’ve enjoyed these incredible SSL stats!

Until next time!

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Nick Galov
Nick Galov

Unaware that life beyond the internet exists, Nick is poking servers and control panels, playing with WordPress add-ons, and helping people get the hosting that suits them.