How to Set Up a FREE SSL Certificate for E-Commerce

It is now crucial to have a SSL certificate for your website. Whether you own an eCommerce store or a personal blog, Google will penalise your website if you do not have a secured site.

For many years, SSL certificates were a costly expense when running a website. They were normally used only for eCommerce sites where transactions were taken place.

These days, you can add a SSL certificate to your site, for FREE.

Free SSL certificates come with not all, but some hosting plans. If your web hosting company doesn’t offer free certificates, then it may be time to reassess your options.

The amount of money spent on SSL certificates per year with web hosts that don’t offer free SSL, can be used to pay for your yearly web hosting needs, plus have money left over.

The web hosting company I use is SiteGround. They offer an unlimited amount of SSL certificates with their hosting plans. Great news if you are running multiple websites.

Set up a free SSL certificate for your eCommerce website

Before we set up the certificate, you need to sign up with SiteGround and add your domain to the account. You can find the current web hosting plans here.

• In cPanel, go to Security, then Let’s Encrypt
• Choose your domain, then select SSL Wildcard (this will cover any sub-domains you may use)

After confirming, it may take up to a hour for the certificate to become active.

And that’s it ! Your SSL is ready.

Now, all you need to do is change your web address in your eCommerce store from http://www.your-domain-name.com to https://www.your-domain-name.com.