WordPress, SSL, And HTTPS Using Let’s Encrypt

With Google search rankings being knocked down for regular HTTP sites, and WordPress announcing that sometime this year features would require HTTPS, I recently decided to look into switching over this website to use SSL. I was cautious at first, since I host my own web server,  but as I dug into it, it wasn’t that difficult to accomplish. As you can see the site’s now live using HTTPS with an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, a free open certificate authority. I’ve compiled a list of sites I referenced when I was researching this project and figured I would post them for anyone else looking to do the same. For the most part, if you have a web host, all you need to do is request an SSL certificate for your site and change the WordPress address. If you’re like me and run your own LAMP server, then you’ll need to look through a few of these pages on getting Apache configured to use HTTPS and the installs for Let’s Encrypt to automate the certificate install and renewals.

HTTPS for WordPress:

• https://make.wordpress.org/support/user-manual/web-publishing/https-for-wordpress/
  • General HTTPS overview for WordPress
• http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-ssl-and-https-in-wordpress/
  • Basic tutorial on making WordPress use HTTPS

Set up Let’s Encrypt:

• https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/adding-free-ssl-https-wordpress/?utm_expid=3606929-101.yRvM9BqCTnWwtfcczEfOmg.0
  • General guide to Let’s Encrypt SSL and WordPress
•  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-apache-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-16-04
  • Install and enable Let’s Encrypt for Apache on Ubuntu
• https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-let-s-encrypt-certificates-for-multiple-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-14-04
  • Install and enable Let’s Encrypt for Apache on Ubuntu when you host multiple sites on one server
• https://certbot.eff.org/all-instructions/
  • This site has all the instructions for using Certbot to automate Let’s Encrypt service. Instructions for Apache, Plesk, Nginx and Haproxy on all flavors of operating systems