Install SSL certificate step by step

Install-SSL-certificate

SSL Certificate Installation Instructions & Tutorials

An SSL certificate serves as a digital “passport” that allows data to be transmitted over secure networks  in encrypted form to protecting financial and money transactions, signups, web access to mail, sensitive information and intranets. It authenticates and encrypts the data transferred through the website to the server.

Before installing you should need to know what is SSL and why it needed to install on your site. You can reed previous post on why SSL/HTTPS is important for website.

How to Install an SSL Certificate –  A step by step guide.

SSL certificate installation is typically performed by the hosting company that provides services for the domain. However, you may also choose install an SSL certificate yourself or any other third party.  Here different kinds of servers may have some different process and steps, but we are showing some standard steps To install SSL certificate.

 

Step 1: Buy SSL Certificate:

If you haven’t bought your SSL certificate with your domain and hosting. You can buy it separately letter from the same service provider or any other third party service provider.

You can also create certificate yourself (called a ‘self-signed cert’), but all popular browsers check with “Certificate Authorities” (CA’s) which also have a copy of that long password and can vouch for you.   In order to be recognized by these authorities, you must purchase a certificate through them. One of the major issue with self-signed certificate it that browser checks the “Certificate Authorities” (CA’s) and may show “Not Secure Connection” in the address bar in red warning . So i personally recommend you to buy Certificate from authorized service provider.

 

Step 2: Create a CSR(Certificate and Signing Request):

Certificate and Signing Request

The next step is to generate a CSR. It’s easiest to do this within your web hosting control panel – such as WHM or cPanel. Go to the SSL/TLS admin area and choose to “Generate an SSL certificate and Signing Request”. You have to fill some filed to generate CSR Request. Once you fill all the filed and submit, you will get a CSR in form of char collection.

Copy the block of text. You’ll need this “CSR” to give to the SSL certificate issuer so they can establish your identity. Login to your account (or wherever you bought your certificate) and activate it. Paste your CSR and any other fields needed. It will ask you for an approval of  email.

 

Step 3: Authenticate your email and Domain Name:

Once you paste CSR to create your certificate,  It will ask you for an approval of  email. This is an email address that proves you own the domain, i.e.,  webmaster@domain.com. If it doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it so you can get the email that contains the final certificate. Follow the steps and when you are done that email address should have received the cert as a .crt file(Certificate file), you can also download certificate latter from your account where you bought certificate.

SSL certificate issuer may also authenticate  domain via uploading an provided key, on your email. You have to write provided key in .HTML file on provided location with provide name. SSL certificate issuer gives you file name,   location and private key to write in HTML file.

 

Step 4: Install the certificate:

This is the easiest step you’ll ever do.  You have the certificate in hand,  all you need to do is paste it into your web host control panel.  If you’re using WHM/CPanel, login it and go to SSL/TLS menu. and click on the “Install an SSL Certificate”.

Here you have to fill require field and paste or upload your certificate file.  After completing this step you will get a success alert. That’s it! Now try to access your site via https://www.domain.com – you should be secure!

 

Step 5: Update your site to use HTTPS

Now at At this point if you go to https://yoursite.com you should see it loading properly. Congrats, you’ve successfully installed SSL and enabled the HTTPS protocol. But your visitors and user aren’t protected just yet, you need to make sure they’re accessing your site through HTTPS!

If visitor and user try to access using http:// your site should will automatically  respond  to https://. To do this server-side approach is to use mod-rewrite. This won’t require you to change any of your website files, but will need you to modify your apache configuration. You need to go to your .htacess file and add below lines of code.

This will ensure that if anyone accesses a page via HTTP they will automatically be redirected to HTTPS.

One more very important thing keep in mind that you typically only need to secure a few pages, such as your login or checkout page. If you enable HTTPS on pages where the user isn’t submitting sensitive data on there, it’s just wasting encryption processing and slowing down the experience. 

if you want to ensure that people can only use specific pages securely no matter what links they come from, it’s best to use a server-side approach to redirect the user if it’s not HTTPS. You can do that with a code snippet inserted on top of your secure page. Here’s one in PHP:

 

Step 6: Things to remember and useful Tips

  • Once you successfully moved to https, make sure that page resources are using https request, if any static link uses http  request, you will get info icon in address bar with alert message.


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About Vijay Dhanvai

A passionate blogger by heart and mind, I have been working in this field for 10 years now. A WordPress Professional, web developer and designer who intends to guide his readers about Web Design, WordPress, Blogging, Web Development, and more.

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