When you are in the web development industry, you would care about search engine ranking. One of the factors which bring a positive result to it is having an SSL certificate. It basically means, that having an https version of your website greatly helps in getting more organic traffic. And to this, you have to acquire the SSL certificate. Good thing how you can actually get free Bluehost SSL certificate easily.
If your site is already hosted on Bluehost, then good for you, this will be easy. But, if not, well this might be a good reason to pack your files up and start transferring. Though the HTTPS version is basically just one out of over 200 other signals out there, it will further boost your website ranking still, especially if you are doing every aspect of SEO right.
See also: How Your SEO Work is Affected by a Hosting Provider
It sounds great, right?
In this article, you will be able to get the FREE Bluehost SSL certificate thru cPanel. So, here it goes.
Enable FREE Bluehost SSL Certificate
Just recently, you can now see an additional new section in Bluehost: the WordPress tools. With this, if you have existing or new Bluehost users, any one of them can enable free SSL certificate. This addon is definitely great because of how it makes managing the WordPress blog easy.
See also: Top 5 Best5 WordPress Plugins
#1 Prepare
As a preparation to enabling free SSL certificate in Bluehost, if you are using who.is guard, you have to make sure that you disable it first for a while. In most cases, the web hosting provider will validate your identity for domain and also use your domain’s who.is information to send the validation email.
If the privacy of who.is guard is enabled, the users won’t be able to send the email. This is why it is important to disable the who.is guard for a while or a few hours. You can enable it again right after the SSL certificate is already activated.
#2 Getting on with it
Next, you have to carefully follow the instructions given and start activating SSL certificate on Bluehost.
- What you have to do now is login to your Bluehost dashboard;
- Click on My Sites menu right on the left side, then select the website which you wish for the SSL certificate to be enabled;
- Now, click on the Manage Site button.
- On the right part of the page, you will see a Security tab just beside the Performance and Settings. Under it, you will the option to enable the free SSL certificate.
- You just have to toggle the button of Free SSL Certificate to enable. By doing this, it will try to activate the free SSL certificate for your own domain. It might take you a while, around 30 minutes.
While you wait, you can also start keeping an eye on your email for the validation which will be sent after enabling the SSL certificate. You will get to receive a validation of domain ownership such as this:
Take note: Receiving the validation email does not mean that SSL certificate will automatically install, it will not.
You will have to click the link it contains and select your email where the validation email for your SSL certificate will be sent. Click on the submit button after putting your email. Wait for 5 minutes to get another email with the steps on validating the SSL certificate installation for a domain name.
If you already received the email, you just have to read and follow the instruction by clicking the first link and simply pasting the code. Pretty simple, right? Then, you can refresh the page again and enable the SSL certificate again, or wait for WordPress tools to automatically enable. But it most cases, you don’t actually have to wait as it enables right away and update your WordPress home and site URL to https version as well.
Final Thoughts
Turning your HTTP website to HTTPS is definitely worth doing. Your viewers will feel at ease of browsing your website. Aside from that, it is one of the search engine ranking factor that you should really look out for. Chrome even starts showing a warning to viewers about the sites that are not using SSL which will definitely greatly affect your traffic.
Did you enable the SSL certificate on Bluehost already? Share this tutorial to your friends and peers as well to let them know.
You might also be interested in knowing other web hosting providers which also offer SSL certificate aside from Bluehost:
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