Site Security, Cloudflare, and HTTPS
Hey all,
Been awhile... ;)
Anyway... bumped into a post pointing me to a place called Cloudflare, which I'm sure all of you have heard of. The blurb was that I could get that highly desired httpS for my site, with minimal fuss.
Looks like it's true. Much easier than installing an encryption certificate and fussing with .htaccess and redirects and... etc.
I did it with a small wordpress blog. Signed up Friday, changed the nameservers at my domain registrar to Cloudflare's, and waited. A couple of hours later they said, Ok, it's all hooked up. But there's no httpS on my site... hmmm....
So now it's Sunday and no httpS... So I went poking around. There was a link on the everview page which said SSL: Flexible. Whatever that means.
So I clicked it and was taken to their Crypto page, which turns out to have a bunch of settings. Two of them referring to HTTPS:
- Always Use HTTPS, and...
- Automatic HTTPS Rewrites
I clicked both of those to "on," waited a few minutes, refreshed my site, and Hey! It works!
Poked around a few posts, logged into the admin area, everything works.
Wow, that was easy. Now to screw up my courage and do it on a much larger site...
Edit: Ok, the images disappeared form one of my posts. No idea why.
Also, the Wordpress visual editor shows no editing icons, though the text editor does.
So Ok, Cloudflare is maybe not a real solution.
Edit 2: Got the images to work. Something about the "height" attribute. set to 413 or 414 or 415 and it breaks, Other numbers, and it's fine. Go figure.
Couldn't FTP to my site. Checked FAQs, hmmm, they suggest using the IP and not the domain name. I'll try that. It worked. Cool.
Recent Comments
6
This is a service offered on all domains here and all websites by default now are getting installed with SiteSSL (https://).
Glad you sorted out your issues, many companies are still charging a lot for SSL certs and many make it very confusing to set-up (which it shouldn't be).
Thanks.
Even with the free certs (elsewhere) there is still all that redirect fuss. As you say, a bit confusing, and even with a nice step by step guide it's a lot to check and verify.
I have several old domains, not on WA, and a couple are pretty good size, so I've been procrastinating. :) And they're a bit rusty anyway (ok, a lot,) so this is sorta step one in getting back into things.
Nice to know WA is doing it at the start. One less headache. :)
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Glad you sorted out your issues, Greg, but as Kyle mentioned there is a service offered at WA for all websites to get the https.
Wayne
Yep, but these are older domains, built up outside of WA. Might look into transferring one of them though...