Why do you need SSL?
The first step to setting up a brand new website on wordpress is Domain Registration. We have covered the best domain providers in this post, for ease of domain finalisation and registration.
Post domain registration, you would need hosting for your site. We have covered the best affordable VPS providers here.
If shared hosting is what you prefer, you can choose our top suggestions here.
The next step is setting up SSL on your website to secure transactions and data inflow/outflow taking place on your website.
In today’s world, it is not only important to protect your data and your visitors’ data, very few would choose to visit your site, if they see Google’s ‘Not Secure’ prompt instead of the little green lock in the address bar.
Cloudflare SSL
Commercial SSL can be bought on any of the domain registrars themselves – most of them would even offer it to you in a bundled deal only. However, they need to be renewed year on year.
Also, any SSL you purchase needs to be installed on your host server to ensure protocol handshakes for your site data requests, and let me tell you, installation of those certificates is not very easy for a programming novice.
So, instead we suggest to use an even better and completely free option – Lifetime Free SSL from Cloudflare, that grants your site security, and does even need you to spend much time on it. The entire set-up can be completed in 5 minutes, and it goes live soon after.
Step 1 - Create a new account on Cloudflare
The first thing you have to do is sign up for a new account on Cloudflare.com, and add a new website.
Once you add the new website, it will direct you to the existing settings page , and there you have to make a few tweaks, which brings us to Step 2.
Step 2 - Change Nameservers on Hosting Admin
After you have linked the site, you have to go DNS settings from the panel, and copy the nameservers.
Then you have to go back to the admin panel of your hosting provider, and change the default nameservers to custom nameservers as given above.
It will take some time (maximum 48 hours, but generally it will go live within an hour), and once the settings are refreshed, all your traffic would pass through Cloudflare and it will be protecting your site.
Step 3 - Turn on Full Encryption in SSL settings
Finally, you have to go to SSL/TLS settings and turn on Full Encryption.
Also, you have to ensure that you do not choose to Cache with Cloudflare in Caching Settings. Caching with Cloudflare can cause multiple problems on your website if you use minifying or lazy loading plugins on your site later on. It’s better to leave that unchanged.
Voila! Your site is now safely transmitting data requests through Free SSL.
Happy Building!
Do let us know if we can help, or if you have any questions. We are happy to help!
If you are looking for custom services, do check out our Services tab for solutions. We have tailor made long-term offerings for start-ups, personal projects, SMEs and brands; as well as standalone deployments.