Beginning this month all property management websites designed and hosted through your Rentec Direct account will receive a major security update and transition to SSL. This SSL upgrade will show that trusty little lock in the address bar for those visiting your website.
The new SSL security update for your property management website will include the lock next to the address in the url bar.
Prior to this update, if you have a property management website hosted by Rentec Direct, the website itself was served unencrypted, and rental applications were forwarded to a separate encrypted server (as they handle sensitive information, that has always been necessary).
This website security upgrade is available to you at no additional cost. You’ll have access to the SSL certificate, server hosting, encryption overhead, and firewalls as an enhancement to your website service so it’s even more effective for you.
Why You Need SSL Upgrades for Your Website
- More trusted. Recently web browsers began showing the words “Not secure” next to any websites that are not encrypted. This upgrade will replace the “Not secure” message with a lock icon. This gives your visitors more confidence to browse your listings and enter their data.
- Google prefers SSL. Being included in Google search results is an absolute must in this day and age and being positioned above your competitor is equally important. By serving your website via SSL, it may increase your rankings on a Google search.
- Lower bounce rate. Because visitors are more confident to browse an encrypted website, they stay longer which improves your bounce rate statistic. By limiting your bounce rate, you keep people on your website longer so they can continue to look around and find the information they need. For those of you familiar with Analytics, you know this is a huge deal and will both help your rankings in search engines as well as improve user experience.
- More secure. Besides adding encryption to every single connection, we are also now able to host the website behind our web application firewall. This means every visitor’s traffic gets filtered to remove anything malicious. This could reduce invalid/spammy leads or rental applications as well as help ensure the security of all of the servers.
Will anything change?
Yes, there are a couple of changes we had to make to support SSL for everybody. These changes will go unnoticed by the vast majority of visitors.
- Automatic redirect to your new url. Your old web address used to look like this: http://yourname.propertymanage.biz. It will automatically change to https://propertymanage.biz/yourname. Don’t worry, we take care of all the technical stuff, forwarding, and link redirects. If anybody who goes to the old website address, they will automatically forward to the new address so there’s no need to even change the address on your business cards unless you like the look of the new one better. We will also tell Google, and all the other search engines, about the updates. You really don’t have to do anything.
- Custom domain name redirect. If you pointed a custom domain, like yourcompany.com, to our servers for domain hosting we will do the same redirection for your domain. For example, if somebody types in http://www.yourcompany.com, we will automatically forward them to the secure version of your website at https://propertymanage.biz/yourcompany. This is necessary because SSL certificates are designed to work on one domain only and because we need to forward all incoming traffic through the firewall.
If you do wish to maintain your domain and have that domain show up in the address bar, please contact us at success@rentecdirect.com and we can forward you the instructions.
Keeping your data safe and secure is a top priority at Rentec Direct. We do everything we can to ensure that both your public property management website and rental listings, as well as your internal account data, exceed modern security standards and best practices.
What is your coverage area around the globe?
Thank you for your interest! Rentec Direct property management software was designed to help US-based property managers and landlords manage their rentals. The Tenant screening products require an applicant to have a US-issued SSN and payment processing requires a US-based business checking account. Having said that, as cloud-based software, landlords and property managers have the ability to use the service while traveling outside of the country.
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