Secure Your WordPress Website with HTTPS for free: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide to Securing Your Website with SSL Andy Williams Author

Fix Not Secure warnings in Google Chrome and other browsers, for free!How many times have you heard about major companies being hacked and private data being accessed? It’s scary isn’t it? Everyone is becoming more aware of the need for increased security when online. We now live in an internet world where trust is everything. If you run a website, then act now. Visitors to your site need to know they can trust you and your website.Visitors now know that they can easily check whether your site is secure by looking up at the address bar of their browser. If a web page is secure, they will see the comforting Padlock icon. Google Chrome (used by around 60% of all surfers) goes one step further and adds the word Secure, just to reinforce the fact.Insecure pages don’t have that padlock, and Google Chrome may even state Not Secure. How would that kill the trust of your visitors?The industry standard for establishing a secure and encrypted link to a website is called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This encryption ensures that all data moving between a web browser and a website server is private. You can tell if a website uses a secure connection because the URL begins with HTTPS. That s stands for secure, so HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP.To create this type of security, you need at least one certificate, issued by a certificate authority and installed on your server. This used to cost a significant amount of money. However, in this book, I will show you how to get a free certificate and install it so that your site is secure. In the process, you’ll also add your site to Cloudflare, a content delivery network that speeds up and helps protect your website from hackers and spammers.In this book you will learn:• What SSL is and why it is important for a website to have that HTTPS prefix.• That Google actually count SSL on a site as a ranking factor.• How HTTPS works and how to set it up on your website.• That some web hosts may have already set up an HTTPS version of your site using something called AutoSSL.• How to check if your site already has a secure version.• Why sites can have both HTTP AND HTTPS versions, and why this is a bad idea.• What to look for in a web host to make the transition to HTTPS simple and pain-free.• What CloudFlare is and why you should be using it.• How to setup a free account on Cloudflare and then add your site to Cloudflare.• How to change the DNS at your registrar.• About the various types of SSL offered by Cloudflare.• About origin certificates.• How to exclude your site from AutoSSL and stop your cPanel from auto-generating certificates for you. You’ll see an example of why this can be a good idea.• How to create a free origin certificate at Cloudflare and how to install it on your server.• How to secure your WordPress dashboard.• How to get back into your dashboard if you accidentally get locked out in the process.• How to set up redirects so that all of the old HTTP web pages automatically redirect to the secure HTTPS version. This type of redirect also alerts Google that the page has permanently moved to HTTPS.• How to avoid a problem caused by a specific WordPress caching plugin, and how to fix the problem if you still need to.• How to check your SSL is working on all pages of your website.• What mixed content is, how to find it, and how to fix it.• That there are other places you may need to update links, including the robots.txt and hard-coded links you may have inserted in the past.• How to update Google Analytics if you use it.• How to update things in Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) if you use this service.The book was created to be hands on, so I show you every step of the process using one of my own sites as an example. You can follow along as we go if you like. By the end of this book, you will be able to move your site over to HTTPS using free SSL certificates.