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What is an SSL Certificate and why you need one for your website

What is an SSL Certificate and why you need one for your website

  • Published: 01-09-2022

  • Related Category: WordPress Tips

  • Type of Content: WordPress Articles

  • Creator: The Best Creators

An SSL Certificate helps to protect visitors to your website by encrypting the data that is sent to and from your website hosting solution.

An SSL certificate is a must for any business that wants to have a layer of protection on a website.

Websites that do not have an SSL certificate will display a warning in a web browser when a customer tries to visit the website. That warning is not great for credibility, so installing an SSL certificate is a must.

Google will also give a small ranking boost if your website has an SSL certificate.

You can check if you have a working SSL certificate by checking if you can see a padlock in the web browser search bar and check the URL.

A website running an SSL certificate will have HTTPS in the URL - example: https://wp-edu.com/

SiteGround is a popular WordPress hosting provider and will give you a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate for free!

Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate

SiteGround Free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate

Note: You should also set up a 301 redirect from the default HTTP URL to the HTTPS URL, this will ensure the SSL is in use whenever someone visits your website.

Good hosting providers like SiteGround will also give you tools to fix mixed content issues.

For example, if you click this link http://wp-edu.com/ it will automatically redirect to https://wp-edu.com/

If you are using SiteGround hosting then the re-direction of HTTP to HTTPS to done automatically!

You can also set up the re-direction manually by editing the .htaccess file with the following update:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond % ^yourdomain.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Here are some other useful SSL certificate WordPress plugins:

Really Simple SSL WordPress Plugin

Really Simple SSL WordPress Plugin

Auto Install Free SSL Certificate WordPress Plugin

Auto Install Free SSL Certificate WordPress Plugin


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