[HOW TO] Free SSL & WordPress website

[pxoxrxn]

except the homepage for some reason

Can you PM me your website? You probably have some external resources that are not obtained through HTTPS.

 

[Zwielicht]

Can you PM me your website? You probably have some external resources that are not obtained through HTTPS.

I just found the issue right now using the "Inspect Element" feature on Firefox . It turns out that my homepage jQuery slider images were loading from Http instead of Https. I simply changed the URLs and this fixed the problem.

 

[Nonilol]

I do also have issues.

My wordpress blog is located at http://agirly.com/blog

What do I have to type in "domain name" in cloudflare?

 

[pxoxrxn]

I do also have issues.

My wordpress blog is located at http://agirly.com/blog

What do I have to type in "domain name" in cloudflare?

What's on your root domain? Or does your root domain redirect to /blog?

I'd say put in yourdomain.com/blog/* and see what happens. It should work.

 

[Nonilol]

What's on your root domain? Or does your root domain redirect to /blog?

I'd say put in yourdomain.com/blog/* and see what happens. It should work.

My root domain isnt a redirect. Its a html page where the user can chose weither he want to visit the blog, the youtube channel, or the facebook page.

I tried yourdomain.com, I will give it another try.

 

[V]

Awesome share, OP. Thanks a lot for sharing it with us, I purchased a cheap SSL cert. sometime ago but it showed a red padlock so I did not use it, but I think I can do it for free now, thanks to you.

 

[pxoxrxn]

My root domain isnt a redirect. Its a html page where the user can chose weither he want to visit the blog, the youtube channel, or the facebook page.

I tried yourdomain.com, I will give it another try.

Please let me know if you got this working. If not, PM your domain and what configuration you've tried.

Awesome share, OP. Thanks a lot for sharing it with us, I purchased a cheap SSL cert. sometime ago but it showed a red padlock so I did not use it, but I think I can do it for free now, thanks to you.

This won't fix the red padlock unless you're getting it because you are using a SHA1 certificate.
Use https://www.whynopadlock.com/ to see why you're not getting a green HTTPS and if you still need help PM your domain.

 

[Nonilol]

Please let me know if you got this working. If not, PM your domain and what configuration you've tried.

Works now. 1&1 needed more than 24hours to change my dns settings as it seems.

I used my rootdomain (domain.com, not domain.com/blog) and it seems to work perfectly fine.

 

[janthony]

thank you dude. i realy need this

 

[irfanrufi123]

Hey, I added the Cloudflare and everything but for some reason, with HTTPS my site goes to this site dkchohan.com

I don't even know the site :|

Any idea?


Thanks for sharing though!

 

[pxoxrxn]

Hey, I added the Cloudflare and everything but for some reason, with HTTPS my site goes to this site dkchohan.com

I don't even know the site :|

Any idea?


Thanks for sharing though!

I forgot to mention an important step, you need to have your website running through CF for 24 hours before you can use the SSL. Please let me know if after 24 hours your website still isn't working.

 

[Zwielicht]

I forgot to mention an important step, you need to have your website running through CF for 24 hours before you can use the SSL. Please let me know if after 24 hours your website still isn't working.

Out of curiosity, how long after you had your website(s) running through Cloudflare did you wait to activate SSL?

On the site that I activated Cloudflare's SSL on, I created the account with a free plan the same day and was able to activate SSL within a few hours of activating the account despite Cloudflare's website stating that it would take up to 24 hours (I created the account around 11:07am yesterday and had SSL on it by 4pm).

 

[pxoxrxn]

Out of curiosity, how long after you had your website(s) running through Cloudflare did you wait to activate SSL?

On the site that I activated Cloudflare's SSL on, I created the account with a free plan the same day and was able to activate SSL within a few hours of activating the account despite Cloudflare's website stating that it would take up to 24 hours (I created the account around 11:07am yesterday and had SSL on it by 4pm).

It says 24 hours but its usually much faster than that. I don't remember waiting because I added my websites to CF and then did this several months later.

 

[Slakpahana]

Thanks for this great share OP !!

 

[mrankin]

Okay, I got it.

I've just one slight issue.
The home page is working fine with https, whereas further pages giving 404.
I've set the wildcard properly as well.
Can anyone help me please?

+1 on this, nice post, but maybe it's not working with all pother plugins? I am also now getting a 404 error on all pages, including /wp-admin so can't login to the back end either.

Will see if I can find the database setting to turn the cloudflare plugin to disabled so I can access my site again - really don't want to have to reload the site.

Recommend all users to perform a full backup first!

Update - I changed the site back to http://blah-blah instead of https://blah-blah in the wp_options table of the database and am now able to login to wp-admin again. Suspect that the last thing to do would be to change those settings.

Further Update - I completed all other settings without an issue. Unable to load my site on https://blah-blah.com getting a CloudFlare SORRY! error. Changed my general site settings to https again, and get the same SORRY! error on all pages. Will once again change the site settings back to http://blah-blah.com and wait 24 hours for DNS changes to take effect I guess.

Final Update - Found and fixed the issue. I am running several subdomains, and started with one of the subdomains. By default these aren't added to CloudFlare and you have to manually add each of the domains, but when you do so they aren't activated. You need to ensure you activate the subdomains by clicking on the cloud icon so that it changes from grey to orange. Changed my site settings back to https:// and it's now working perfectly. Thanks for effort in putting this together!

 

[pxoxrxn]

+1 on this, nice post, but maybe it's not working with all pother plugins? I am also now getting a 404 error on all pages, including /wp-admin so can't login to the back end either.

Please try a couple of things before taking any drastic measures.
Make sure your .htaccess is writeable (777).

Disable all your plugins via the database to see if you can load your page. https://perishablepress.com/quickly-disable-or-enable-all-wordpress-plugins-via-the-database/

After you've done that, activate CloudFlare and see if you can use that plugin alone. If you can't my guess is that your path variables aren't being written. If you can, your error is beause its conflicting with another plugin.

 

[SombodyLoLz]

Nice method, thanks for the share.

I'd also add a .htaccess to force HTTPS a connection

 

[John.]

Excellent thread - Thanks a million for this!!

 

[william19510]

Very good additional tips. Appreciate it.

 

[pxoxrxn]

Changed my site settings back to https:// and it's now working perfectly.

I'm glad you got this working and thanks for keeping us updated with your solution.