How to Add a Free SSL to Your WordPress Site?

One of the best ways to secure your WordPress website is to have an SSL certificate installed. Before discussing how to get a free SSL for WordPress site, let’s discuss what SSL certificate is and what its importance is.

SSL Certificate: An Introduction

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate helps secure websites and all data transmitted online by encrypting and decrypting the communication that takes place between a user/web browser and website/web-server. Thus, if a website has an SSL certificate, the communication transmitted through the browser/website/server is encrypted and decrypted in such a way that only the sender and the recipient would be able to see it in the decrypted form. All communication through the SSL- the protected website is safe and highly secure. Even financial transactions can be done in a secure manner through websites secured with SSL certificates.

SSL certificates do the encryption-decryption work as a multi-step process, which begins with the browser attempting to connect to the SSL-secured website. The website would ask the webserver to identify itself, to which the website responds with a copy of the SSL certificate. The browser checks if it trusts the SSL certificate and if so, it sends a message to the server, which response with a digitally signed acknowledgment to start an SSL encrypted session. From here starts the encrypted communication.

Any website secured with an SSL certificate would have its URL beginning with “https://”.

Installing Free SSL for WordPress

Comodo offers Free SSL for WordPress, installing which is very easy. Some simple steps can help you complete the installation process, which will help secure your WordPress website. Here’s a look at the installation process…

If you want to install Comodo free SSL for WordPress to your new WordPress website, you should first update the website URL, which you can do by going to Settings » General and updating your WordPress and site URL address fields. If it’s an existing website, you would have to set up WordPress SSL redirect from HTTP to HTTPS, which can be done by adding in your .htaccess file: the following code-

1<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
2RewriteEngine On
3RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
4RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R,L]
5</IfModule>

You need to put the URL of your website in place of https://www.yoursite.com.

Now, if you intend to add Comodo Free SSL on your WordPress multi-site admin area or login pages, you should go to your wp-config.php file and then look for “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”.

Above that, the following two lines need to be typed-

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);
define(‘FORCE_SSL_LOGIN’, true);

Comodo Free SSL thus gets installed on your WordPress website; you can now see the https in your address bar. The WordPress website is now secure; you or anyone can transmit data through the website and even make transactions, without fear of data getting stolen…