ssl padlock

Made the site secure

After Google announced earlier this month that they were including HTTPS as a ranking signal (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html), I thought I’d take the plunge, buy myself a SSL certificate and get this site up and running under https.

Having installed a SSL cert earlier this week using a terminal connection and doing it purely over command line prompts and SSH, this was a cake walk. Generate the crt in WHM, buy the certificate, authorise it, get the bundle and cert back, install it. Boom. Easy.

Next steps were to:

  • change the WordPress domain to https://www.matthewpont.com, check that the SSL padlock was green (which it wasn’t due to Google fonts being loaded on http:// which I had to change).
  • Change Analytics to be on https
  • Verify the site in WMT and submit a sitemap
  • Redirect all non https traffic via .htaccess

All pretty easy. Recommend doing it. I’m not expecting my rankings to soar, but it’s nice having a green SSL padlock on my site and makes me look that tiny bit more professional.

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