How to Install Free SSL Certificates With Let’s Encrypt and cPanel
Back in 2015, Let’s Encrypt launched with the goal of providing free SSL certificates to any site that wanted on.
Just over a year later, and they are succeeding in a big way with millions of sites using their SSL.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Let’s Encrypt for your site. This tutorial uses hosting from Rochen.com, our hosting partner.
Step #1. Access your cPanel account
Go to yourdomain.com/cpanel and login.
For example, I’ll go to http://www.joomlatraining.com/cpanel to set up the SSL certificate at it. That will redirect me to http://www.joomlatraining.com:2082, which is cPanel’s port:
Step #2. Access Let’s Encrypt
- Scroll down and click on the “Lets Encrypt SSL” icon in the Security section:
- In the “Issue a new certificate” area, click on the “Issue” button next to your domain:
- Choose to issue the SSL for both your email and your site:
- You will now see a success message. Apache will restart in the background and your SSL should be available. Congrats!
Step #3. Check the SSL on your site
- Double-check the new SSL by visiting the https version of your site:
Step #4. Redirect traffic to https
The SSL certificate is now functional on your server, but you need to tell your server and your website to redirect traffic to https. You can do the server redirect using this tutorial.
As for your website itself, it depends on your CMS. For example, in Joomla there’s a Global Configuration option that forces SSL on all pages. In WordPress, you can get a plugin to redirect your site to SSL. Contact us if you need any help.
This was remarkably easy! I was surprised to find that Rochen had already installed a Lets Encrypt certificate to my site & email, I just needed to edit the .htaccess file and force https via my Joomla backend to utilise it. However, while https is working fine for my email, index page and the whole of my admin, all other pages are throwing a 404 error.
Any suggestions?
For reference: I found that the changes made to my .htaccess file were unneccessary and were in fact causing the problem. (That advice from ostraining WAS over 2 years old.) I restored my original file and all appears fine now.
Thanks for sharing the solution Michael and good job figuring it out 🙂
Daniel
I think this is built into the Joomla global configuration now.