Setting up SSL on your website is not difficult for The Hosting Heroes customers!
It takes around 5-10 minutes for the average user to setup and SSL certificate including configure your website CMS and enforcing https://
Below is a few methods for installing, configuring and setting up an SSL Certificate on your website.
Step 1 – setting up a SSL Certificate
The Hosting Heroes offer a range of Premium SSL Certificates from £29.99 year, our most popular premium SSL is our cheapest certificate “Rapid SSL” Which can be purchased from https://www.thehostingheroes.com/services/our-ssl-certificate-packages/ once ordered you will be emailed a TokenID which is used on our funky automated SSL installer tool.
To install the SSL certificate Login to your web hosting control panel which will be cPanel or Plesk and click on Auto Install SSL which looks like below:
When the SSL installation wizard loads, you will be asked to enter the TokenID that was sent to you from The Hosting Heroes. If you can’t find the email then you can also find a copy of the tokenID inside the client area by going to your services and open your SSL certificate, scroll down to find the TokenID.
You will be asked on the next stage to enter the domain name to setup a SSL certificate on and your personal details.
Once the SSL certificate is installed check that https:// YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME works without any error.
Step 2 – Configuring your website for SSL.
Each website is different when it comes to setting up SSL. We’ve listed a few options below based on our history of SSL questions coming from our hosting customers.
We have some guides below for different CRMs and custom build/html websites.
WordPress
Login to your wordpress admin area (typically www.your-domain-name/wp-admin)
Go to Plugins > add new and search for Really Simple SSL and click install.
Once installed activate the Plugin.
This should be all you need to do and your website should now load from https:// with a GREEN padlock. If you do not see the green padlock in google chrome then consult your website developer to fix your wordpress theme to remove any hard coded http:// content.
Other CRM/CMS Systems
Most CMS systems work similar so the process shouldn’t be to much different from one CMS to another. Login to your Admin area using creditials with full admin permissions. Go to your domain settings (usually setup/general settings) and change your website from http:// to https:// and also follow the below instructions from custom websites to enforce SSL.
Custom built websites/html websites
We have 2 methods to enforce SSL based on what operating system your website is hosted on. Linux is typically cPanel and Windows is Plesk on our shared hosting, VPS & Dedicated Servers may differ depending on your preferred control panel (if any).
cPanel:
Login to cPanel
go to File manager
open folder “Public_html”
top right hand corner click “settings” then tick “Show Hidden Files” and click save
this will show all hidden files in file manager
right click the file “.htaccess” and click EDIT
Add the following text at the very top of the file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
# This checks to make sure the connection is not already HTTPS
RewriteRule ^/?(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]
save the file. When you visit your website it will now load in https
Plesk
To enforce SSL redirect in Plesk its much simpler.
Login to Plesk
Click Hosting Settings
Then select “Permanent SEO-Safe 301 Redirect from HTTP to HTTPS and select your SSL Certificate from the list below it
Scroll down and click OK and this will then enforce SSL.
We hope you found this blog article useful and you are able to encrypt/secure your websites traffic and boost your search engine results and increase website sales.
