in this video I'm going to show you how to install a free SSL certificate on
your WordPress site I'm going to show you two different ways to do this
depending on which hosting company you use what's happening everyone my name is
Greg Kononenko you might also know me as the Caffeinated Blogger and on this
YouTube channel I published regular tutorials dedicated to traffic
generation blogging affiliate marketing and making money online click the
subscribe button just below this video and click the bell notification icon and
this way you will get an instant notification next time I upload my next
video let's get into it first of all let's stop quickly why you
actually need an SSL certificate so the first time back in 2014 Google on their
official security blog said that for now they're starting to use HTTPS as a
ranking signal in 2014 back then it was a very lightweight
signal affecting fewer than 1% of global queries ok then they posted an update in
February 2018 and they said that for the past several years we've moved towards a
more secure web by strongly advocating the sites that adopt HTTPS encryption so
once again they've confirmed twice that if you have HTTPS or a security SSL
security certificate on your website then you're very likely going to get
more traffic from Google so very very important if you don't currently have an
SSL certificate you should definitely go ahead and install one so let's talk
about the first method method one is going to be useful for you if you're
hosting supports what's called let's encrypt I'm going to show you everything
step-by-step I'm going to show you how to find out if you're hosting actually
supports the let's encrypt free SSL certificates and just in case it doesn't
then I've actually got a second method right here in this video that you can
use as well so here are a couple of ways that you can check whether your hosting
actually supports free SSL certificate from let's encrypt or not firstly you
can type into Google what hosting supports let's encrypt and the first
result that will come up just open that up and you will see a list of hosting
companies there are two lists this first list and then the second list and check
if your hosting company is there or not I use SiteGround I really highly
right-side ground as a hosting company I think there
awesome and SiteGround is one of the supported companies under let's encrypt
there are a lot of other famous companies you know common companies that
support let's encrypt as well the second way that you can actually check is you
can log into your account into a hosting account and then you can check from
there I'm now inside my side ground account and I'm going to log into my
cPanel and I will show you how to check that in cPanel so I'm inside my cPanel
now and generally if you scroll on the security or a similar tab and your
cPanel depending which version your host uses you will see something called let's
encrypt okay so this is if you see this let's encrypt under security somewhere
we can even just press control f and start typing it L et and it might come
up somewhere in the page if you have a lot of different options and different
icons that means that your company actually supports let's encrypt and you
can use this method so let me show you step-by-step how to do this using let's
encrypt built into your web host now just in case you do not have this let's
encrypt just scroll a little bit further in this video and I will show you second
method right of how to install free SSL certificate even if you're hosting does
not support let's encrypt okay so let's do this based on the example of my
website travel crock on which I want to install an SSL certificate so the first
step will of course be to click on to let's encrypt in your cPanel then scroll
down until you see something that says install new Nets encrypt certificate and
then choose your domain from the list so I've now got travel crock comm selected
and I want to choose the SSL type let's encrypt SSL don't go for the wild-card
just the top one is fine and click install then you will see a success
message saying successfully installed SSL let's encrypt certificate added
success rate of installation cute just click OK to check the progress for your
installation here is what you can do just go into your domain and type in
HTTPS then that semicolon and two slashes and type in enter ok if you see
that now your domain loads without any issues via HTTPS that means that your
certificate has actually issued generally with side ground it only takes
one or two so as you can see I've only just done
this and now when I come to my website HTTP certificate actually loads fine
before the installation of the SSL certificate if I did this if I typed in
HTTPS in front of the domain name then I would have got an error saying there is
no valid security certificate so however you can still see that there is this
little I I can if I click on that it says your connection to this site is not
fully secure so this is because these images are still stored on the non SSL
the non secure version of the web site but there is a very easy fix for that as
well you will need this plug-in called really simple SSL so you need to make
sure that you don't forget to install really simple SSL I'm going to show you
how to do that right now login to your WordPress admin panel and
then type in to search plugins type in really simple SSL and hit search take
this first plug-in that comes up you can see it's got over a million active
installations with a 5-star rating all you need to do is click install and once
it's installed you will need to click activate so now you can see I've got the
activate option which I'm going to click then you will see this message almost
ready to migrate to SSL you will just need to click go ahead activate SSL and
the plug-in will do what it needs to do after you activate it
when you try to go to another page on your website you will notice that you
will get this error message forcing you to log back in that is now because the
plug-in is forcing your website to load over HTTPS and this is treated as a
different login session by your browser so you will need to log back into your
website once again now I've logged back in as you can see everything is working
great I've now got that little icon if I come back to the home page of my website
and reload it you can see that I've now got the icon so our free let's encrypt
SSL certificate is now activated and is working great we're now done with the
first method if you're not sure which hosting you should use then once again I
recommend side ground there very fast and the support is great and they also
have this free SSL certificate through let's encrypt as well you can check the
link in the description below to get the name
to get SiteGround hosting but now let's talk about method number two what if
your hosting does not support let's encrypt SSL don't
worry there is still a very easy way to set up free SSL even if you're hosting
does not support the let's encrypt certificate we're going to show you
everything step-by-step so for the purposes of this demo I've taken the SSL
certificate off for my travel crock website you can see now it's loading as
not secure and if I type in HTTPS in front of it once again it will actually
not load it will give me this error message saying that the requested page
cannot be found so for this method we're going to use CloudFlare CloudFlare
actually has a free SSL certificate function and it can help you in other
ways as well I run my high traffic websites through CloudFlare because it
allows you to speed up your website by loading your website simultaneously
through various servers around the world it's actually really easy to set up and
it's completely free so you can just use the free plan and the free plan of
CloudFlare comes also with free SSL so let me show you how to do this so first
of all you will need to register an account on CloudFlare if you don't have
one yet and after you register the account then log into it so I'm just
going to login because I already have an existing account with CloudFlare you
will want to then click this button called
add a site and type in the name of your website so here I'm just gonna type in
travel croc calm you don't need to put www or HTTP at the front just the actual
name of the of your domain let's go ahead and click Add site now so then you
will see this message saying they're going to query your DNS records so click
Next you will then need to select the plan so just go ahead and choose a free
plan and hit confirm so you'll need to confirm one free website it will now
display some of the DNS checks you don't need to change anything on this page
simply come down to this continue button and click continue now you will see that
CloudFlare is asking to change the name servers from the existing name servers
- these CloudFlare nameservers how this might sound a little bit technical
don't worry going to show you everything step by step so you do this inside the
same service where you bought your domain so for example if you bought your
domain through name chip then you will need to do this inside name chip if you
bought your domain through your hosting for example if you bought your domain
through side ground you would do it inside ground if you bought it through
through GoDaddy then you would need to do it inside GoDaddy okay now I buy all
of my domains inside name chip so I'm going to log in to my name chip account
and I'm going to show you how to change it inside name chip so inside Namecheap
account simply type in your domain and choose manage you will see something
here called name servers so you will need to change these two name servers to
this CloudFlare name service so the first one I'm going to copy that and
paste it in here and then I'm going to copy the second one and paste that
inside here and then I need to hit save and now it's all done and saved okay now
we can come back here into that's just wait until this finishes loading you can
see now this success message DNS server up there may take up to 48 hours so
everything is now saved so just to clarify if you're not entirely sure
where you need to do this then try to think where did you actually buy the
domain name you can search your email for it and if you did not do this
through Namecheap like I did if for example you bought your domain
through another service then go to that service and submit a ticket to them and
ask them to do this for you they generally will be more than happy to do
this for you they can update your DNS name records - these ones that
CloudFlare has given you you can also Google so if you can you can type in
something like how to update name servers on GoDaddy how to update name
servers on Bluehost etc and Google instructions will generally tell you how
to do that as well so now come back to CloudFlare and click continue you will
see this page that says complete your name server set up travel chrome is not
yet active on CloudFlare that's fine so we've already done this so all you need
to do is just recheck now and you will see that it will
it's now queued up to be rechecked and shortly generally within probably an
hour so these DNS records will get updated it might take up to 24 hours for
that to happen you don't need to do anything your website is not going to be
down in any way this transition is completely seamless so don't worry you
can go ahead and do that it's been about two minutes I've actually just refreshed
this page and you can see that now it says great news CloudFlare is now
protecting your sites so it did not take long at all so now what you will want to
do once this has happened you will want to come down to this tab here called
security and it says encrypt traffic to and from your website SSL settings so
let's click that what you will want to do now is on this page make sure that
this setting is set to flexible there are a few different options flexible is
the best one for you without kind of getting too technical just wanted to
make sure that you know that this is the one that you want so now let's go back
to my web site and see if it's now loading fine via HTTP so I'm now back
here on my website let's type in HTTPS and see what happens so the page
actually loads fine without any problems via HTTP I just once again now I'm
getting these warnings about mixed content this happens because all of
these images are actually in the background stored on the HTTP version of
the website so I actually need to install a special plug-in that will help
solve this problem once you're inside your WordPress admin click on add new
under the plugins section and then search plug-ins for really simple SSL
and install these first results really simple SSL click install now and then
once it's installed click activate the plugin is now activated so now let's go
back to that page and double check and make sure that the error message has
actually disappeared we're back here let's click this reload and now you can
see that we've got the full icon and there is no more error message and
everything is actually working great so once again just to recap what you need
to do you need to wait until your domain is activated and CloudFlare it might
take up to 24 hours but don't worry your site will not be down during this period
you just need to wait until those name service changes actually
go through journey that happens within a few minutes now after that you will need
to type in HTTPS and then your site name and just make sure that you set is
actually loading via HTTPS all right that's the next step once this is
happening then go to your website log in to admin and then install and activate
the really simple SSL plugin like I was mentioning to you guys before CloudFlare
actually has got an added benefit it's completely free and it will also make
your site load faster as well which is very important for Google rankings these
days plus of course it will give you that free SSL certificate which means
that you will get even higher Google rankings as well if you want to get my
free blogging training then check the link in the description below there is a
free master class and a free course that you can sign up for to find out how to
build a blog and how to get traffic to the blog in any niche thank you so much
for watching I really hope you enjoyed this video my name is Greg Kononenko on
this YouTube channel I published regular tutorials dedicated to blogging traffic
generation affiliate marketing and making money online click subscribe just
below this video and tick the little Bell notification icon to make sure that
you don't miss any of my future tutorials thanks again for watching I'll
see in the next video