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*Updated 4/4/2019*
One of the many perks of using Kinsta for your web hosting is that you get free SSL!
What do you need to know about SSL?
By SSL, we mean an SSL certificate. Having an SSL certificate means you can access your site securely with https:// (instead of simply http://).
An SSL certificate makes your website more secure. It’s often a requirement for e-commerce websites. Even if you aren’t selling anything on your website, Google includes it as a ranking factor.
That’s why it’s so great that Kinsta lets you get a free SSL certificate via the Let’s Encrypt service. (With other web hosts, you have to buy a certificate and either install it yourself or pay someone to install it for you.)
In the above video, we show you step by step how to add SSL to your website if Kinsta is your host. You can also refer to the following transcript.
How to Install an SSL Certificate on a WordPress Site with Kinsta Hosting
Today we’re going to enable https on a new site by adding an SSL through Kinsta.
As you can see, we have not yet added SSL. The site is not secure – it is not https yet.
We’ll go back to our Kinsta dashboard. I got here by clicking on “Sites” on the side (I wanted Cheer Coach Finder) and then “Tools” on the side.
We’re going to go to “Enable HTTPS”.
On the drop down menu, I will click “Generate a Free HTTPS certificate”.
Kinsta provides free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. I’m going to go with that so I’ll click “Next”.
They asked me which domains I want – I want cheercoachfinder.com and www.cheercoachfinder.com – so we’ll click on “Generate Certificate”. This takes a little bit of time – you can do other things obviously on your computer while you wait.
Okay, so it’s done. I’ve got a message that says Let’s Encrypt credentials are set up. So we’ll go back and we’ll try the HTTPS version of the site again. Last time, we had that error message, but this time the site comes up.
Okay, so the other thing I’m going to do is – I want to add a redirect from http to https. I want everyone using the site to only use the secure version.
I can do that just by asking Kinsta so I’ll click on that little icon in the bottom right hand corner and start a new conversation.
Okay, so I messaged Kinsta, asking them about adding a redirect from http to https for my site, and they did it for me. And you can see if I go to the non https version, it redirects me to the secure https version. And we’re done! Thank you.
2019 Update
Great news!
You no longer have to ask Kinsta to add the redirect from http to https for you – you can do it yourself right in the Kinsta dashboard!
You can see how to force HTTPS redirect in this video:
