How to Implement SSL in WordPress on Shared Hosting, Cloud?

Make your WordPress site accessible over HTTPS by implementing SSL on cPanel hosting, Cloud server, Cloudflare, EasyEngine, Cloudways.

Securing a website is not optional and as important as content, design, or SEO. One of the essential tasks of securing the site is to configure SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security) certificate, so your website is accessible only through HTTPS.

HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) ensure the data transaction between a client (browser) to the server is encrypted. Data could be anything from username, email, password, or credit card if you are running an online store.

Lately, HTTPS is also included in search ranking signal, so it’s not just for e-commerce sites but applicable to all. The good thing is you can get it started in FREE.

Let’s get into technical details.

You may offload the SSL handshake at multiple levels.

Web Server
Load Balancer
Network edge/CDN

The prerequisite for configuring your website accessible over HTTPS is SSL/TLS certificate.

Let’s Encrypt offers a FREE certificate, and there are some more, which I mentioned here. And if you want to buy Symantec, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. then you may get it from SSL Store. Let’s see the implementation details. The following, I’ve used my test domain (techpostal.com) with a Genesis theme.

As a best practice, take a backup before making changes, so in case something goes wrong, you can rollback.

Shared Hosting (cPanel)

Most of the top shared hosting like Site Ground, Bluehost offer a FREE certificate under all the plans. If you are hosting your site on cPanel hosting, then the following steps would help you.

The below example is from Site Ground but should work with any cPanel hosting provider.

Login to Site Ground
Go to My Accounts >> Go to cPanel

Go to WordPress toolkit under Tools

Click Manage under Actions

Click Configure SSL

It will open a popup, select Enable SSL and change

SiteGround will provision Let’s encrypt certificate for your domain and make the necessary modifications in WordPress, so it’s accessible over HTTPS.

You can validate by accessing your URL with https in the browser. In my scenario – it would be https://techpostal.com

This indicates my WordPress site has SSL enabled, which is good but there is a small problem.

The problem is that the site is accessible over HTTP and HTTPS both, which is not good and has to do one more configuration change to ensure all requests are served only over HTTPS.

Go to cPanel
Scroll down a bit and click Let’s Encrypt under the Security section

Turn ON HTTPS Enforce & External Link Rewrite

Congratulation! You’ve successfully enabled the certificate for your WordPress site hosted on shared hosting. Verify by accessing a few pages to ensure it works as expected.

Note: some of you have reported that images are not showing as it tries to load over HTTP. If you are encountering this issue, you can fix it by installing the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin. The default configuration worked for me.

If your hosting provider doesn’t offer free SSL, then you may want to try out Site Ground.

Cloud/VPS

Personally, I would prefer to have an SSL handshake terminated at a network edge device or CDN.

Below instructions are based on Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04 using FREE cert offered by Let’s Encrypt. However, if you are using Apache HTTP server, then refer this for traditional cert, and this for let’s encrypt.

Login to your Cloud/VPS server with root
Install the Let’s Encrypt client

apt-get install letsencrypt

Generate the certificate for the domain

letsencrypt certonly --webroot -w /var/www/html -d techpostal.com -d www.techpostal.com

Note: change the --webroot with your actual DocumentRoot location. In the above command, I’m generating a cert for domain including www, so if someone tries to access using www it will not give certificate error.

It will prompt to enter the email address

Accept the terms & condition

It will take a few seconds, and you will get a confirmation with notes, including cert location.

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - If you lose your account credentials, you can recover through
   e-mails sent to ck@chandan.io.
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at
   /etc/letsencrypt/live/techpostal.com/fullchain.pem. Your cert will
   expire on 2017-11-10. To obtain a new version of the certificate in
   the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.
 - Your account credentials have been saved in your Let's Encrypt
   configuration directory at /etc/letsencrypt. You should make a
   secure backup of this folder now. This configuration directory will
   also contain certificates and private keys obtained by Let's
   Encrypt so making regular backups of this folder is ideal.
 - If you like Let's Encrypt, please consider supporting our work by:
   Donating to ISRG / Let's Encrypt:   https://letsencrypt.org/donate
   Donating to EFF:                    https://eff.org/donate-le

Let’s configure Nginx to listen on port 443 and provide SSL cert details.

Edit the Nginx configuration file /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and add the following in server block under listen directive.

listen 443 ssl default_server;
listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/techpostal.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/techpostal.com/privkey.pem;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:15m;
ssl_session_timeout 15m;

Restart the Nginx

service nginx restart

Now, you should be able to access WordPress hosted on a cloud through HTTPS.

In default + above configuration, Nginx is listening on port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) both, which means a website is accessible on both protocol. To ensure all the request is served over HTTPS, you can install Really Simple SSL plugin.

Once a plugin is installed, Go to Settings and click “Go ahead, activate SSL!”

Once activated, you will get a confirmation

Verify by accessing a site with http:// and you will notice it will be redirected to https://. Additionally, you may also want to test your site for any SSL/TLS vulnerabilities.

Great! WordPress site is successfully secured with an SSL certificate on the Cloud server.

Cloudflare

One of the easiest ways to add SSL to a website is through Cloudflare. Cloudflare offers many performance & security advantages, including FREE SSL cert.

If you are using their service already, then here is how you can enable it quickly.

Log in to Cloudflare and go to Crypto tab
Ensure SSL setting is not Off (Flexible is good)

Scroll down a bit, select ON for “Automatic HTTPS Rewrites.”

Easy, isn’t it?

Note: If you notice mixed content issue, then you may need to install Cloudflare Flexible SSL plugin as I explained here.

EasyEngine

I love EasyEngine. It is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get WordPress running on Cloud server or VPS in less than 10 minutes.

If you’ve installed WordPress with http:// using EasyEngine then you can upgrade to https:// with the following command.

ee site update yourwordpresssite.com --letsencrypt

Ex:

root@techpostal:~# ee site update techpostal.com --letsencrypt
Letsencrypt is currently in beta phase. 
Do you wish to enable SSl now for techpostal.com?
Type "y" to continue [n]:y
Downloading LetsEncrypt          [Done]
Please Wait while we fetch SSL Certificate for your site.
It may take time depending upon network.
Let's Encrypt successfully setup for your site
Your certificate and chain have been saved at /etc/letsencrypt/live/techpostal.com/fullchain.pem
Configuring Nginx SSL configuration
Adding /var/www/techpostal.com/conf/nginx/ssl.conf
Adding /etc/nginx/conf.d/force-ssl-techpostal.com.conf
Added HTTPS Force Redirection for Site  http://techpostal.com
Creating Cron Job for cert auto-renewal
Reload : nginx     [OK]
Congratulations! Successfully Configured SSl for Site  https://techpostal.com
Your cert will expire within 89 days.
root@techpostal:~#

Just one simple command and you are done.

Cloudways

Cloudways is fantastic for managing the cloud-hosted platform. You can launch your website on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Kyup, Vultr & DigitalOcean from a central platform.

To enable Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate on WordPress site managed through Cloudways, you got to do the following.

Login to Cloudways platform >> Applications
Select the WP site >> SSL Certificate
Enter your email & domain name and click “Install Certificate.”

It will take a few minutes, and once done, you should see it has successfully enabled on the domain name.

The good thing is you don’t have to worry about certificate renewal as Cloudways take care auto-renewal automatically. Cloudways offer a FREE trial, so you can give a try to see how it works for you.

So that was all for today about implementing SSL/TLS certificate correctly in WordPress. I hope this helps.