Dreamhost: Adding An SSL Certificate To WordPress

hi I’m Sean from Posner media and in this video I’m going to show you how to add a free SSL certificate to your WordPress site using DreamHost will also make use of a free wordpress plugin to make sure that our site always loads via HTTPS after we’ve activated the SSL certificate to use the setup that I’m going to be showing you on your site you will need a dreamhost account and your site will need to be hosted with DreamHost to be fully
transparent I am a dream most affiliate I’ve been using dreamers since 2006 and regularly recommend them to clients and friends you’ll find my affiliate link in the description below if you buy through my link I appreciate your support and I’m here to answer any of your questions so before we jump in it’s important to understand that you can of course also set up an SSL certificate using many other options but in this example I’m going to be
showing you how to set this up using dreamhost and do keep in mind that DreamHost does provide free SSL certificates on all their plans where some other hosting providers charge an additional fee for this add-on so let’s jump in for this example I’m going to be using my demo site my PA’s medCom and if we have a look at this page you’ll see that the site is currently not using an SSL certificate at the top left here you’ll see that the URL is not
displaying the HTTPS and we cannot see that secure lock it’s actually says not secure in the browser and if I click on this it says your connection to the site is not secure so we want to change this we want to install a SSL certificate and we want to make sure that this website and all pages on the site always load over HTTPS and that the browser displays a secure connection in the URL bar if we compare this to PA’s main Mediacom for example you
will see that this site is using an SSL certificate and at the top left here it is loading of HTTPS and if we click on the secure lock it says that the connection is secure so what we want to do is jump into our DreamHost dashboard on the left we want to click under domains SSL Certificates I’ll mention this again to set this up using Dream oast your site will need to be hosted on your dream host account and your domain will show up on this page
for this example this will be my PA’s Mamiya comm and then to the right we want to click on add on this next page you’ll have an option you can either use the free let’s encrypt SSL certificate or you can pay fifteen dollars per year to use a Komodo TV certificate for this example we’re gonna use the free let’s encrypt certificate so we’re gonna select the certificate so here we go this is our success message telling us that the certificate has
been ordered for our domain it also tells us to allow up to 15 minutes for these changes to be pushed out to the server they also tell us note that we will attempt to validate the certificate for you but you may need to confirm control over the domain by clicking the confirmation link in the email sent to your selected domain verification control address please allow up to 24 hours for this message to arrive you can also resend the email from the
domain settings page so here we go in my email client here’s the confirmation email from dreamhost that they fulfilled the order they say we have your let’s encrypt certificate for my PA’s micom we will be installing it on your site in a few minutes so next what we want to do is while they installing this is we want to go back to our demo site and if we log into the backend of dashboard which I’ve already done in this tab we want to install a
free plugin that is gonna help us always force redirect all page visits through HTTPS so I’m gonna go and install this plug-in under plugins I’m gonna click on add new this plugin is called really a simple SSL so there we go I want to install this plug-in so I’m gonna click install now it’s been installed now when I click activate and it’s telling me almost ready to migrate to SSL some things can’t be done automatically before you migrate please
check for HTTP references in your dot CSS and dot J’s files images style sheets or scripts from a domain without an SSL certificate remove them or move to your own server and then it is recommended to take a backup of your site before activating SSL this is best practices when you make any changes it’s always good to have a latest backup of your site great so we’ve installed this free plugin to force all the traffic through HTTPS and we have set
up the SSL certificate in the dreamhost panel I know for a fact that Remos won’t be sending me another verification email to confirm my email because I’ve done that in the past so once you’re ready to activate the SSL you click this button go ahead and activate SSL so there we go it says SSL activates it don’t forget to change your settings in Google Analytics and webmaster tools once you activate an SSL certificate on your it’s important to go
into Google Analytics and webmaster tools to update that so now while recording my session actually expired and I had to go back to my login page and I can already see that my website is loading over HTTPS and it’s displaying the lock so here we go I’ve logged back into the site I’m in the backend of WordPress and I can really see that my website is loading of HTTPS and if I click on this lock icon it tells me connection is secure if we open the
site in new tab we can also see that our website is loading over HTTPS and we’ve got that secure lock and the connection is secure so there we go that’s all it takes to setup your SSL certificate using dreamers that only takes a few minutes I also recommend making use of that free wordpress plugin really simple ssl to make sure that all your traffic is routed through the HTTPS connection if you aren’t already an existing dreamhost customer and
you’re interested in signing up I would appreciate if you sign up using my affiliate link I’ll leave that link in the description below if you have any questions leave them in the comments below I’m here to support you and I’ll leave any other links that I may have mentioned in the description below if you found this video useful hit that like button and make sure to subscribe to see future videos thanks for watching I’m Sean from paws memedia
wishing you a great day and I’ll chat to you soon Cheers