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How
to Install an SSL Certificate on a WordPress Site
2019-04-08 Russian translation ~ Spanish translation First of all,
what exactly is an SSL Certificate? SSL stands for Secure Sockets
Layer, and
this digital certificate authenticates the identity of your website,
and in
turn encrypts all the information being sent to the server using SSL
technology. Having this
certificate serves as a type of electronic passport, which in turn
establishes
your credentials while doing business on the Internet. Each SSL
certificate is made up of the following information: ●
The name of the certificate
holder. ●
The serial number and expiration
date of the certificate. ●
A copy of the certificate holder’s
public key. ●
The digital signature of the
authority who has issued the certificate Having this
certificate certifies that there is a secure channel between point A
and point
B on the Internet. So you want to
have an SSL certificate for your WordPress site. Since all of the above
may be
nonsensical to you, here are the reasons why you should have the
certificate.
If you have an eCommerce site, you will need to have this certificate
before
you can accept any form of payment. If you have any
password-protected pages on your website, you also want to know that
this is
protected by an SSL certificate. What if you don’t
buy and sell anything on your website, but you do collect sensitive
information
from your visitors? With an SSL certificate, all information is
encrypted and
secure. How else can you
secure your website? Use a VPN VPN stands for
Virtual Private Network. This isn’t something that is WordPress
specific, it’s
a service that can, and some say should, be used by anyone on the
Internet
today. The purpose of this network is to help you to remain anonymous
while
online and secure or encrypt your data. For a WordPress user,
especially one
that may run some sort of business, they could definitely use the
protection of
the VPN. Depending on your system, there may be some features you need
to look
for, for example, check out this review
of PureVPN. Choose A Secure Host Before you
install your new WordPress site, you have to have a server to host it
on. You
may be tempted to choose the cheapest hosting service You can find, but
this
isn’t necessarily the wisest course of action. Your website will only
be as
secure as the server upon which it sets. So take the time and do the
research
to ensure that the host you ultimately pick is reputable. This doesn’t mean
you have to take the most expensive host available. There are some
remarkably
good hosting providers to choose from that are relatively inexpensive. Secure Passwords There are a
variety of ways to secure your WordPress site, but for the sake of this
article, let’s deal with the most basic, and the easiest to implement. When installing a
new WordPress site, you are given the option to change the default
username,
and you are also required to choose a password. Make sure that password
is a
long, complicated password, ideally consisting of letters, numbers, and
symbols. Letters should be a mixture of both upper and lower case.
Brute force
attacks look for the username admin as well as weak passwords. Don’t
make it
easy for hackers to access your site. Protect the WordPress
Login Page This is a step
that many WordPress security plugins will offer to do for you, but it
is also
something that can be done manually with relative ease. One of the
steps in
which you can do this is to rename your login URL. By default, the
WordPress
login page is accessed by either using wp-login.php or wp-admin.php
after the
site’s URL. This means that anybody who knows your site’s URL also
knows the
URL to access your site’s admin if you have been changed it. What you want to
do is something like this: ●
Change wp-login.php to something
like cool_new_login ●
Change wp-admin.php to something
like cool_new_admin Install Your SSL
Certificate You thought I’d
forgotten about this, didn’t you? No. Here are the steps to obtain and
install
your SSL certificate. Depending on
where your website is hosted, you may be able to obtain an SSL
certificate at
no charge through your hosting provider. If not, there are a variety of
third-party providers through which you can purchase a certificate.
Annual
costs can range from anywhere from $5 to $200. If your host
provides the certificate at no charge, they will have a method for it
to be
installed on your site. If you have purchased your certificate, you can
either
contact your host and ask them to install it for you, or choose a
WordPress
plugin that will install it. Older blog postings....
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