Hi all, I am the tech newbie person tasked with changing our website from http to https. The website is ancient (10+ year old design…?), minimally maintained, lots of widgets (many unused and I’ve uninstalled), not essentially updated except at the 9th hour, etc.
Google provides a lot of fairly complex lists of things to accomplish this, and then there are the posts that say, “SimpleSSL”. At this point, I’m on a deadline to move to HTTP. I’m NOT on a deadline to figure out how all this works, and I hate black boxes. So I’m committed to doing this. So I have 2 questions:
1. What’s the risk of SimpleSSL breaking hte website, in your experience? I’ll provide this info shortly.
2. Can you recommend any online course or book that I can take or read to try to figure out how to do this and also learn more about the specifics of website hosting so I can troubleshoot better? I’ve a theoretical understanding of how the internet works, but I’m not in the specifics. I feel like I need quality experience and quality instruction to make this efficient. So I’m attempting to use this assignment at my job as the experience and am hoping for an online course.
I do feel out of my depth, but in my experience in learning other things, I usually realize my feelings of inadequacy are usually greater than warranted. So please be gentle and any details would be very very appreciated.
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Don’t use the plugin. Contact your hosting provider.
Your hosting provider should provide https with let’s encrypt.
Make off site backup
Enable ssl at host
Better search and replace for http:// / https://
Pray that nothing gets fucked up or breaks.
Personally I don’t think you should do this and whoever is getting you to do this should pay a professional bit considering their site is 10+ years old without ssl they probably don’t give a fuck / value a professional.
really simple ssl rarely breaks the things, though it can if disallowed on the server, like if you host on pressable.
Most hosting providers offer free ssl’s now though.
But you probably should hire a professional…
Thank you all! I appreciate the gamut of replies and details. Please keep them coming!
I will speak to our hosting service about their help in moving us to HTTPS, but they ARE a nonprofit, and are overworked. They are in the process of offloading us (and a bunch of others) to a for-profit company, and I am hoping the move doesn’t break our website. I’m not qualified to fix it.
Absolutely _nothing_ you are doing in this switch to SSL should involve a wordpress plugin, especially one that isn’t free.
You need to do the following:
1) Acquire free SSL/TLS certificates from LetsEncrypt. (Do this by following the basic instructions for certbot or whatever other acme client meets your requirements—personally, I’m a fan of [acme.sh](https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh) over certbot.)
2) Configure the web server application on the webhost to listen for HTTPS connections. This ought to include configuring the server to issue automatic 301 redirects to send any HTTP connection attempt over to HTTPS.
3) [Update your wordpress configuration](https://wordpress.org/documentation/article/https-for-wordpress/) so the site is now aware that it’s going to be served over HTTPS.
If any of that sounds over your head, then you should seek some professional assistance, either through your web host or perhaps via this community.