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This article begins with the assumption that youre not looking for an in-depth explanation of what
HTTPS is, how encryption works, the difference between TLS and SSL, or why you should or
shouldnt obtain a certi cate. There are plenty of articles about that. No, you just want the fancy
green padlock in front of your URL, I hear you.
This is not the only way to enable https on your website. There are a lot of use cases for encryption,
and I only know what Ive done. Lets Encrypt is an alternative method thats free, but still in beta, so
that might be an option for you. Otherwise, read on.
9 dollars
SSH access to your server
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Con
Tania rmation that your host supports TLS
Rascia
HTTPS
Steps to
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WordPress?
Ill supply some additional information at the end about making sure HTTPS works properly with
WordPress.
I cant guarantee that this will work for you, or youll that be approved for a certi cate,
but it seems to be a common method that works for most people.
A CSR is a Certi cate Signing Request. You need to generate one on your server. This is done with
an Open SSL command, which should be available by default from Apache.
SSH into the server, migrate to somewhere that isnt a public directory, and paste the following code,
changing YOURDOMAIN.COM to your domain.
openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout YOURDOMAIN.COM.key -out YOURDOMAIN
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E-mail
Tania Rasciaaddress
For Organization
and Organizational type NA.
Unit, you should
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Search
Obtain an SSL Certi cate
SSL or TLS?
If you want to read more about the differences between TLS and SSL, you may do so here or here.
To over simplify, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the old and TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the
new, but its often still referred to as an SSL certi cate. Here is a website to test your SSL
con guration, which will show you which TLS or SSL youre con gured with, and how all browsers
are responding (sadly, you will lose IE6 support).
Pricing
Certi cates can vary from free to $5 to hundreds of dollars and more per year, depending on what
type you get and where you shop. You can get a certi cate from Comodo or Geotrust or
NameCheap or GoDaddy or any number of providers.
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PositiveSSL
Tania Rasciaprovided by NameCheap is a popular and inexpensive choice with good
documentation. However, there are plenty of other choices.
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Any party you get your certi cate from will require you to purchase, then validate and approve it.
This will probably be done through email validation, in which theyll send an e-mail to
you@YOURDOMAIN.COM, HTTP, in which you upload a le to your public directory, or DNS based, in
which youll be asked to point a CNAME.
Once validation is complete, you will have your SSL certi cate, which you can download.
A certi cate will only be valid for one year, at which point youll have to renew it.
The nal step will be to install the certi cate on your server. If youre using shared hosting or
managed hosting, you will need to provide your host with the certi cate so that they can install it for
you.
You will need to modify your Virtual Host to be listening on port 443 (HTTPS) instead of port 80
(HTTP), specify your SSL key and certi cate les, enable SSL, and restart the server.
Whether your set it up yourself or your host did it for you, going to https://yourdomain.com should
work, except it might throw mixed content warnings youll have to make sure any le being
served from your site is from a https URL.
Once youre absolutely certain everything is working properly, you can point a 301 permanent
redirect from your HTTP address to the HTTPS address.
There are a few things youll have to do before WordPress will work properly with HTTPS.
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Enable HTTPS
Place this in wp-con g.php.
$_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
Conclusion
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Hopefully
this article cleared up the process of enabling encryption on your website. It might seem
Tania Rascia
like unnecessary setup if youre not a company or collecting private information; however, if it costs
$9/year and a few hours to make the web just a little safer, to me its worth it.
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Here is a Coding Horror article about web tra c encryption and the future of the web. If nothing
else, it will play a factor in your Google search ranking.
The Author
If you've found this article helpful or interesting and think others would bene t from reading it, please share!
Thank you for reading! I'm Tania Rascia, and I write no-
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Discussion
Kyle
August 30, 2016 at 1:05 am
Also SSL now is an SEO ranking factor because it instills con dence in users and increase their good
experience with the website. SSL is very necessary.
Reply
Havjo Anas
August 4, 2016 at 3:18 am
Reply
templates.id
March 10, 2016 at 5:46 pm
I love your style explaining step by step tutorial. Cost of ssl nearly same as cost of domain, are there
any bene t to apply ssl to boost search rangking?
Reply
Rumen
February 17, 2016 at 12:29 am
I did the same using http://letsencrypt.org/ + their SSL certi cates are free
Reply
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Tania
February 17, 2016 at 9:26 am
Tutorials
Yep, I did includeSnippets
a link to Lets Encrypt atTania
the top of the article.Portfolio Thoughts
This is just another method I
chose this method because I only have to renew once a year, instead of every 30 days.
Reply
Andy Storey
June 28, 2016 at 2:47 pm
If you have access to the command line on your host, you can setup a crontab job to renew every
30 days!
eg:
30 2 * * 1 /opt/letsencrypt/letsencrypt-auto renew >> /var/log/le-renew.log
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