How To Get HTTPS: Setting Up SSL On Your Website
When you deal with sensitive data on your website, it is important to get the SSL certificate to ensure data remains secure. For this, you have to enable HTTPS which will make sure that data going to or from the server gets automatically encrypted. When you have SSL on your website, you can keep hackers away and your sensitive data is secure. One of the biggest advantages of securing sites with SSL is that is easy to install. When installed, you simply have to direct people to use HTTPS and not HTTP. When you try to access the website using https:// before the URL without the SSL installed, you will get an error.
– To start with, you need a dedicated IP address to be able to install SSL. There are web hosting solutions which can give you shared IP addresses; so, there will be many sites using one location. But when you have a dedicated IP address, you can sure that the traffic which is going to that address will only come to your site. When you lack a dedicated IP address, you need to upgrade the account.
– You will then need to buy the certificate. This will comprise of some letters and figures which only your website is supposed to know. So, it is somewhat like a long password. Every time a viewer accesses your site, it is checked. When password matches, the data flowing in and out gets encrypted.
– You need to then activate this certificate and you can ask your host to do this for you. When you decide to do it yourself, you will need a CSR. You can perform this within the control panel like a cPanel or WHM where you visit the SSL area and click on “Generate an SSL certificate and Signing Request” option.
– You must then install this certificate. You can once again approach the host for this but you should check with them beforehand. When you do this on your own, you simply have to paste the certificate in the control panel.
– Finally, you must update the website to use this HTTPS. While users are not protected immediately, you can ensure that they will access the site through HTTPS. HTTPS should be enabled only on pages which contain sensitive data like the checkout page.
