Personally, I think SSL certificates are only worthwhile if you're transferring secret information, like bank records or passwords, but I'm finding that more and more sites are just adding SSL anyway. I've got a personal axe to grind in that my Windows 98 machine would still be able to browse any website, except it doesn't have the new root certificates or the newer TLS/SSL mechanisms used by the internet. Although this seems like "first world problems", it means I can't easily download old game patches to my win98 machine. I have to download them to the Win 7 machine (now Linux), and then copy them across the network. Meh, no biggie, but when I see an ancient file hosting website that contains a patch for a game from 1993, and it's using SSL, it irritates me no end. There's no reason to go to all the CPU and bandwidth overhead to encrypt a patch for Master Of Orion or something.. Gah!
Anyway, it's undeniable that pretty much everyone's going for SSL certs, and these days the wildcard certificate seems to be cheap as chips. It's crazy to think, but back when I first ordered my first SSL certificate, it cost over £100, took a week, and I had to FAX a letter from me and the CEO on company headed notepaper to an address in france or switzerland. They processed the request and issued the certificate to us over a 3-part email response which had to be to the company secretary... Crazy stuff!
What's even crazier is that you had to specify the EXACT FQDN of the site and the IP address of the server for it to be processed. Wildcard certificate (like *.google.com) that work for the TLD and all subdomains were virtually unheard of and cost an absolute fortune (if they even worked). I remember IIS having kittens when we tried to load it in.
The crazy thing is that the wonderful hosting company I'm using (Ionos) give me hosting, a VPC, DNS addresses, DDNS for about £10 a month... All those things combined would have crippled small countries when I first started with internet hosting... and they even offer wildcard SSL certificates in any format you like (including pre-installing it on your behalf if they host the site) FOR FREE. Yes, the expensive complicated option when I started out is now considered the starter option and offered for free!!! Holy crap how things have changed.
Well, installing the certificates and keys was pretty simple with my web server... Way simpler than it used to be with Apache and IIS in the late 90s! While some things have got much harder, securing your site is now a matter of three mouse clicks and one config file you can copy from a template online.
Hurray for me, but let's pour one out for anyone trying to read my site from Windows 9x :-(