The above video is created by Emit.Reviews, check out his site for some more great information.
When you go to your site and you get a message that says something like”This site is not secure”. That means you need to install an SSL certificate. So in this video Emit is going to show you how to install a FREE SSL certifiate.
Go to https://dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up
and fill in your details also put in your website name that is displaying the not secure message.
Now, choose the free version and click on confirm plan. Cloudflare will now take a few seconds to scan your website records and once it’s done just click on continue. Sometimes you get this screen where you need to click continue with default and sometimes you go to this screen directly.
But anyways you’ll be presented with 2 name servers keep this window open for later. Now, you’ll need to update your name servers to re-route traffic through Cloudflare securely I’ll use Hostinger as an example here but the process is almost identical for absolutely any web hosting provider.
As long as you have access to the DNS or domain name system. Once logged into your web hosting provider where you bought your website name navigate to the DNS management area for Hostinger, you just need to click manage here next to your domain name.
Now you’ll see your name servers delete the ones that are here and simply copy paste the ones that Cloudflare gave you. There should be 2 nameservers only. Now, click done check name servers.
Here select the flexible option and make sure always use HTTPS is turned on. Finally just click on done and now you’ll need to be patient, because the name server update it’s not instant.
Basically your server needs to tell the whole Internet that something has changed about your website and that traffic is being re-routed. This change can take anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of hours in extreme cases.
Just keep refreshing the page once in a while until you see this screen. Do not do any further steps before the name servers are finished updating but if you see this green check mark that means you’re good to go and we can continue.
Navigate to your WordPress dashboard, we’ll need to install a few plugins to make the SSL work. First find the Cloudflare Flexible plugin, install and activate it. This will solve some issues with redirect loops.
Next, find and install the Really Simple SSL plugin. Once activated click on “Go ahead and activate SSL” button. Now, some of you might see this screen and go into full panic mode. But do not worry, stay calm, this is caused by caching if you would go to an incognito tab you can open one in chrome by clicking ctrl shift and n at the same time and type in your web address you would see everything is working fine and your site is secure for free.
It even recognizes the Cloudflare certificate that we’ve just activated and once the cache automatically clears up your website will be working just fine. And don’t worry this is not disrupting your users because this is happening on your computer only.
But even though you have a green lock and the secure tag your website is still not fully secured you seem there’s a difference between the flexible and full encryption modes that Cloudflare is offering.
The flexible mode encrypts the connection between the user and Cloudflare but not your web hosting server. The full encryption mode which is a bit harder to set up does an end to end encryption that means the connection between the user, Cloudflare and your server gets encrypted.
If you’re interested in stepping up your security and going the full encryption route keep watching and of course it’s gonna be completely free as well. Okay so, it’s been around 10 to 15 minutes in real time.
Let’s see if the cache is already cleared I’ll just refresh the page using control + shift + R on chrome. This refreshes the page and clears some cache elements. And awesome looks like it’s working already, let’s go back to our Cloudflare account and click on the SSL/TLS tab then change the encryption mode to full.
Keep in mind, your website might be down for some time while we’re working on this. You can see that a green lock is now added between Cloudflare and your server. So, now click on the origin server and then create certificate leave everything as is and you can see this certificate will be valid for 15 years.
That’s a pretty long time click on next, these symbols are your certificate that you’ll need to upload to your web hosting server. Again, I’ll use Hostinger for this tutorial but I’ll also show you how to do it on cPanel for those using other web hosting providers.
So, first of all keep the Cloudflare window open, if you’re using Hostinger, next to your web hosting plan click on manage. Scroll all the way down until you find SSL and click on it. Then copy paste the certificate and private key from the Cloudflare window that you kept open from the previous steps.
For the CA bundle I leave a link in the description to this page you can scroll down here and find the CA bundle that you can copy paste as well. Now, just click the install button and you’ll see a certificate appear and working.
Here’s how to do the exact same steps on cPanel and if you’re not using cPanel take this time to like the video and subscribe to my channel this helps more people see my videos and learn, thank you! By the way, once you install this certificate and make the switch from flexible to full mode this might happen.
Oh no another error! Keep cool dudes. This is the exact same thing as before, if you would try using an incognito mode ctrl shift + N on Chrome and type in your web address it would work fine.
It’s the exact same deal as before, things just take a bit of time to catch up. I even tried this from another browser I’ve used Firefox and as you can see here it’s working fine.
And the certificates show up to be valid and installed and after some minutes even if I do try to refresh the error screen that I got earlier you can see that it’s all working good so just have a little bit of patience.