An SSL certificate is essential for securing your website and improving its credibility. It encrypts the sensitive information transmitted between your website and its users, ensuring that it is protected from potential breaches.
Furthermore, in August 2014, Google announced that it would use HTTPS as a ranking signal. This means that websites that use HTTPS will be ranked higher in search results than those that don’t.
With SiteGround, the process of installing an SSL certificate is straightforward.
This tutorial will cover the steps required to install an SSL certificate on your SiteGround website successfully.
Right, let’s get started.
This tutorial assumes the following:
- That you have already created a website on SiteGround, such as WordPress.
How to Install an SSL Certificate at SiteGround
The first step is to log into your SiteGround Site Tools dashboard, which can be accessed via your SiteGround client area.
You can find details on how to do this in the following articles:
Following these steps, you’ll be on SiteGround’s Site Tools dashboard.
You’re in luck. When you create a website with SiteGround, an SSL certificate is automatically installed for you. However, there are rare occasions where this doesn’t happen (such as if your DNS still needs to finish propagating).
To check if your website already has an SSL certificate, click on the Security link in the left-hand menu of Site Tools, and select the SSL Manager option.
You should see an active Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your website. If you don’t (which is unlikely), you’ll need to install one manually by following the steps below.
For this tutorial, we’ve deleted the SSL certificate that was automatically installed for our website. We’ll now install a new Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate using SiteGround’s Site Tools dashboard.
To install the SSL certificate:
- Select the domain name for which you want to install the SSL certificate.
- Select the type of SSL certificate that you want to install. In this tutorial, we’ll be installing a Wildcard Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. This will cover all subdomains of your website.
Then click the “Get” button to install the SSL certificate.
Once you’ve installed the SSL certificate, you will see a confirmation message saying that the certificate has been installed successfully.
You will also see the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate listed in the SSL Manager, as shown below.
As you can see, installing an SSL certificate on SiteGround is a simple process. It should be automatic, but on the rare occasion it isn’t, you can install one manually using SiteGround’s Site Tools dashboard in less than a minute for free.
Now that you have successfully installed an SSL certificate on your SiteGround website, we recommend that you automatically redirect all visitors to the HTTPS version of your website.
You will find complete instructions on how to do this in the following article: