Deploy free SSL Certificate for your website
There are both pro and cons of having SSL certificates but you need some expertise to make your site so. In this article I will guide you through installation of SSL certificate for you sites so that it can be accessed via https://yoursite.com
The prerequisites for installation is a SSL certificate generated from SSL certifier and access to your website cPanel.
Certificate Installation
- Visit https://www.sslforfree.com/ site and enter your domain name proceeding with clicking Create SSL Certificate
- Further you have to verify that the domain you entered is owned by you using one of the approach viz. Provide FTP Details or Upload the Verification files
- I choose to provide FTP details so that the site itself can upload test file confirming the ownership
- When the credentials you entered are matched Download SSL Certificate button will provide .zip file containing SSL certificate files along with Private Key file
- With above files now navigate to your cPanel and go for SSL/TLS module to proceed further
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- Now Click the Private Keys (KEY) Link to upload your .key file that will autopopulate the details required within the Form
- Click the Certificates (CRT) link to upload the certificate.crt file included in your .zip file
- Now after successful completion of above steps you Click Install and Manage SSL for your site (HTTPS) link
In this page you will choose a Domain for which you are willing to install the certificate from the dropdown and let the system find installed certificates by clicking Browse Certificates button that lists above installed certificates - Now click Install Certificate and the process is done
Note: The SSL certificate will last for 90 days only so after that you have to regenerate the certificate and deploy again. To get notified of the expiration create account in the site that is prompt to you in the page shown after successful download of Certificate file
.htaccess configuration to force always use HTTPS connection
Now after installation of SSL Certificate you can manually navigate to https://yoursite.com to test the working. But the site is equally accessible from http://yoursite.com . In this section let me show how to force that site is always accessed securely by use of .htaccess file
- Create a file named .htaccess in root of your web folder that may be (www/ or public_html folder) via FTP Client or simply navigating to your File Manager from cPanel
- If there is already a file named .htacess you can simply edit the file to add the text shown below
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
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