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Comment by uxp | Hacker News Reader

It's been studied and pointed out that a green-bar does nothing to conversions and sales.

I'm not debating this point, but if you have some citations for this assertion, I'd love to read them. I've always heard and read otherwise.

I just completed a multiple-month-long process of converting a dynamic-domain application to support SSL-friendly URIs and implementing SSL on it's web servers based entirely on the concept of adding a green bar for boosting conversions (data isn't quite in yet to verify we did anything). I would really hope that I didn't waste multiple iterations on a pipe dream.

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> I've always heard and read otherwise.

Those "Get better conversion rates with EV Certs" internal studies are pure marketing B.S. by the SSL vendors. Do not trust what they say.

Every single person that has tested this on his site has come to the same exact conclusion - the green-bar has no meaning to the consumer, nor do they even notice it.

http://www.theroiteam.com/blog/is-an-ev-ssl-worth-it-or-even...

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/7697/ev-ssl-ce...

http://forum.x-cart.com/showthread.php?t=54707

http://www.quora.com/VeriSign/Does-ecommerce-conversion-incr...

The first link mentions EV certificate handshake is slower. Is that really the case? What is the reason?

I'd like to see some facts to back that up: I suspect it is bunk, another problem somewhere that has been mistakenly attributed to the certificate type (perhaps they altered other SSL options on their web server at the same time as changing the cert, or the non-EV cert uses smaller keys so takes less CPU time to process).

The EV certs contain extra information so are likely to be a little larger, but we are talking at most a couple of hundred bytes here so the extra download time getting the cert and CPU time verifying things are not going to be significant.

People do tend to have larger key sizes on EV certs (2048 or 4096 bit rather than 1024 or 2048 (though 1024 bit keys are increasingly rare even for "standard" certificates)) which might impose a measurable latency difference on a mobile (or other low-power) device due to the math involved in verifying the site against the certificate, but nothing like the order of magnitude that link mentions.

Because the browser is going to check if the certificate is revoked as part of the ssl handshake. We have gotten sites being not available because the service that the browsers use to do this validation were not responding fast. The handshake took up to a minute.

Considering Amazon.com doesn't bother with an EV cert, I'd guess they don't affect conversions in any sort of positive manner.

Amazon also says that Settlers of Catan is the number one selling children's musical instrument toy. They don't do everything 100% right.

Once you click your Account, or try to login it will send you on via verified https:// regular pages and the cart does not have SSL. Possibly for speed issues

Yes, it's HTTPS, but it's not EV HTTPS. There's no green bar, just the lock icon that anyone with a $7/year SSL gets.

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