Add an SSL to Your Site
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Having an SSL certificate installed on your site is a must nowadays. It not only encrypts sensitive information that goes through your site like personal details, credit card numbers or login details, but is also required by many browsers to show correctly your site and by search engines to not penalize your site for being insecure.
How to get a Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
By default, we try to automatically issue a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for each site created on our platform. The installation process may take up to 72 hours after the domain of your site has been registered and/or properly pointed to our Name Servers. You can check if the SSL has been successfully issued in Site Tools > Security > SSL Manager. Look for a certificate with status Active in the Manage SSL table.
You may also issue an SSL certificate manually. We recommend this in case the automatic SSL provision has not been completed in 72 hours after your site was created and its domain was properly pointed to our servers. To install a new Let’s Encrypt SSL from Site Tools, go to Security > SSL Manager > Install New SSL. Select the domain, choose Let’s Encrypt and click Get.
How to configure your site to work properly with the SSL
In order to make your website work correctly with your SSL certificate, you need to make additional configuration so that all the site traffic goes through HTTPS.
That’s it! Our plugin will ensure that all your site traffic is always correctly redirected to HTTPS. Once you enable the HTTPS, you may be requested to log in again in the WordPress admin, this time securely. We recommend that you also browse through your site after you switch the HTTPS to see that everything is loading correctly.
Note that plugin will be preinstalled by us if you created the website at SiteGround. If you have transferred your website from another provider, download the plugin from here.
Enforce HTTPS through Site Tools
You can enforce all your site traffic to go through HTTPS in Site Tools > Security > HTTPS Enforce.
We highly recommend that you configure the HTTPS in your application, whenever possible instead of doing the enforce through Site Tools. Site Tools HTTPS enforce should be used if you’re not using one of the popular web applications or you’re experiencing problems even after reconfiguring your app.