These days getting a security certificate for your website is very easy. This is because you can even get this certificate for free. You however need to make sure that a few things are in order before acquiring this certificate.
This security certificate is known as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate and it offers cryptographic functionalities to your website. This in other words means that your website is secure with information being encrypted during transmission from the client’s side to the server side.
So, if you are a website owner who has an SSL certificate on your website you enjoy the following benefits:
- Better customer trust levels
- Better Google search ranking of your website
- Better website visibility
- Better customer conversions
- Secure data in server(s)
How then do you get an SSL certificate?
To get an SSL certificate you will need to do the following tasks:
- Buy a Certificate
When performing this first task, you will need to factor in a number of things:
- Cost
- Website purpose
- Type of data
- Network infrastructure
With this information then you will balance out these factors to chose the SSL certificate you will want to buy.
- Activation of certificate
This step can be done by your web host where you can contact them for this process.
You can also choose to activate the certificate yourself by generating a CSR key. All you need to do is logging in to your control panel such as cPanel where you will go to the SSL/TLS admin section to select “Generate SSL certificate and Signing Request” and fill the fields given.
On completion you will copy the CSR and paste it any fields required. You will give the email that you registered the domain to prove your ownership of the domain.
- Install the Certificate.
Just like the previous step, y0u can contact your web host to this task for you. If you choose to do it yourself, you will just need to copy the certificate and past it on you hosting account control panel.
In case you are using cPanel, then you will just click “Install certificate” on the SSL/TLS Menu.
- Update Your website to use HTTPS
This is the last step which you will need to configure your website so that it can detect the SSL certificate has been installed and the protocol to be used is HTTPS.
You can also configure all pages on your website to use this protocol. To ensure that people are can use specific pages securely then you can install the SSL certificate on the server -side.
Now you have successfully acquired and installed an activated and properly configure SSL certificate to your website. Now you website visitors can enjoy secure interactions with your website without worry of attacks.
