In this video we walk through the process of issuing your SSL certificate on WP Alpha hosting.
SSL certificates on WP Alpha are free and powered by Let’s Encrypt. A certificate lets your site load securely over HTTPS, and you will need to issue one for any new site. For a small business website the free certificate is all you need, so there is no reason to buy a paid one.
Step by step
- Log in to the hosting admin console and go to Websites & Domains.
- Open the Dashboard tab for your site. If no certificate has been issued you will see “Domain not secured”. Click it to open the SSL panel.
- Click Install next to the option to install a free certificate by Let’s Encrypt.
- Check the email address shown, then choose to secure the root domain and the www version of the domain.
- Click Get It Free. The certificate takes around 30 seconds to issue. You can click away while it runs, because it carries on in the background.
- Once the certificate is installed, enable HSTS. This forces the site to always load in secure mode.
- Leave the option to include subdomains switched off, so HSTS applies only to your domain and its www version.
Things to check
- A wildcard certificate is also available, but it requires you to add DNS records. Most websites do not need one; the root domain plus www is fine.
- If your site lives on a subdomain, such as shop.yourbusiness.net, you probably do not want to secure a www version of that host name.
- Let’s Encrypt certificates are valid for 90 days and renew automatically, so you do not need to reissue them by hand.
Common problems
If your domain runs through Cloudflare and you filter traffic from outside a particular country, those rules can block the verification requests Let’s Encrypt uses to issue the certificate. In that case you may need to add a Cloudflare rule that lets the verification traffic through, then try again.
If you get stuck, our support team can help. Log a ticket from the client area or start a live chat.