The latest monitoring shows that about a third of all sites in the world are built on WordPress. But most sites still do not use a secure protocol.
What is HTTPS for?
The story takes its beginning when someone in the “corporation of good” decided almost forcibly to make the Internet safer. Good or bad, that’s another story.
But the fact remains that Google gives preference to sites working over an encrypted protocol. And if you consider that now mobile traffic has long surpassed traffic from a PC, and more than 90% of mobile devices have Google search by default, then recommendations will have to be taken as voluntary-compulsory.
What does SSL do?
As the name implies (Secure Sockets Layer), the protocol encrypts all transmitted traffic, the data is relevant for authentication when the username and password are transmitted to the site, how much this protocol is needed for read-only sites, the question is of course controversial.
Since July 2018, Chrome has marked all HTTP sites as “insecure.”
How to enable HTTPS in WordPress
There are a lot of options, but we will consider the most simple, in my opinion.
Before switching, you first need to get the certificate itself, directly from the hosting control panel and wait until the certificate is installed. The certificate is renewed automatically.
We make a backup of the entire site, you can do this with the help of special plug-ins, such as Akkeba, or with hosting control panel tools.
Really Simple SSL is one of the most commonly used plugins for switching HTTP to HTTPS. In addition, it is really a simple plugin, plus support for the Russian language.
You can download the plugin from here.
Load and activate the plugin. Go, settings – SSL, the plugin will check the certificate. Go to the update section and update the translation, after which the plugin should be displayed on the “great and mighty.”
Plugin setup
Configuring the plug-in is simply disgraceful, the only thing that needs to be done is to turn on the protocol, in the figure it is a green button. Then you have to log in again.
In some cases, the site may be marked with a yellow lock (mixed content), then you need to go to the settings of the plug-in and enable the correction of mixed content.
SEO
Remember that the search engines http://site.ru and https://site.ru are two different resources, so register the site with Yandex Webmaster and Google Webmasters, if you haven’t done it before, and report that the site has moved.
Make a redirect to the site version in SSL, this can be done in the hosting control panel, in the “Sites” section.
