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On August 2014, Google announced that they are going to consider SSL and https as a ranking signals. This announcement is one of the few announcements in which Google clearly defined an action as a factor that could be implemented by all. Many companies, including us, made all our web pages accessible under https and benefited from this new factor.
Unfortunately though SSL certificates can be an expensive investment. For instance for www.smartseohosting.com where we provide client support under https://www.smartseohosting.com/client/ we have an EV certificate which provides us with a Green bar but also included extensive business review by the provider and costs us around $250.00 per year. The cheapest SSL out there for a 1 year plan is not less than $9.00 and because of this many blog networks simply cannot afford to be on SSL… Well at least until now!
Today Smart SEO Hosting is proud to say that all our clients can apply for valid, global SSLs for ALL their domains and for as long as they keep their domains with us.
In other words you can add SSL to all your domains and move them all under SSL for free and through your WHM panel.
One of the major drawbacks of SSL certificates is the creation, validation and installation process. Traditionally one needs to use openssl to generate a key and a CSR. Then the CSR needs to be sent to an SSL authority and have them verify the domain ownership. Which is usually done through email verification. After that SSL authority generates a public key, a ca bundle file and sends them to the requester. Finally all those files plus the first key has to be installed on the web server. This process may take few hours from the the first step till when the SSL is finally installed on the webserver.
For SEO experts who own their own blog network this time consuming process plus the costs associated with SSL makes it impractical to have SSL for all their SEO network. So in addition to providing free SSLs for all our clients we had to design a system where SSLs can be installed and issued as simple as possible. That is why we came up with a one single click solution where you can perform all the above steps by just selecting a domain from your list of domains and have your SSL certificate issues and installed.
It is simple:
1- Login to your WHM account.
2- From the menu on the left bar find the plugin section and then client on “SSL Certificate”
3- Now you should see the list of all your domains. Select a domain which you want to have SSL for.
4- Click on “Apply and Install SSL certificate” button.
5- Wait as the process might take few seconds
6- In few second you will get a confirmation on screen that SSL certificate is issued, verified and install automatically. Then you should be able to access your site under both https://yourdomain.com and https://www.yourdomain.com
As wordpress is the most popular tool among our clients we think it is only fair to dedicate a section on how to change your wordpress settings. After following the above steps your wordpress site should already be available under https://www.yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com (depending on your wordpress url setting) but not all content are yet served under ssl. For that you need to follow these steps:
1- Please login to your wordpress admin panel.
2- Go to “Settings” menu on the left then click on “General” and change both the URLs from http to https
That is it! Your blog is now fully https capable. Just keep in mind if the fields to modify your site URLs are grayed out it means the settings for your site is set under wp-config.php file. In that case you will need to go to your cpanel account (not whm) select “File Explorer” and edit the content of wp-config.php.
1- My page doesn’t look or is rendered correctly or some of the images are missing.
After moving your domains to https, browsers wont allow none https contents to load for https url (that is a security measure implemented by most browsers). So if you have some URLs in your html that points to http than their https url they wont get downloaded. As a result your css or images might not get downloaded and the page won’t render properly. To fix this just make sure you do not have any hard coded http URLS in your html files.
2- How long the SSL is valid for? The SSL is valid for as long as you stay with us.
3- What happen if I delete an account and add a new domain to my list of domains? You can get a new SSL for the new domain for free.
4- What about my extra domains? Your extra domains can apply for free SSL just like the rest of your domains.
1- The SSLs are only available on our SEO IPs. You will not be able to install them separately on WHM or any other server.
2- This offering is in Beta stage. Please open a support ticket if you face any problem or you noticed a bug.