Ulrich Scheller, Android & AWS Consultant

My webhoster 1blu has finally added the possibility to get a free LetsEncrypt SSL certificate for this website. So www.ulrich-scheller.de is now available via HTTPS.

Let’s Encrypt

With LetsEncrypt getting an SSL certificate is free. There are many reasons for using HTTPS but hardly one against it. This is especially true whenever you enter credentials for logging into your website. In case of this blog and profile page it didn’t matter too much, because the only person with a login is myself. All the content was and is available publicly, so there is no need for a high security level. However, HTTPS is also one of many ranking signals for search engines. And it is just good practice to use encryption wherever it doesn’t hurt.

Simple but not that simple

Moving your website over to HTTPS is very easy. Usually, you just tell your webhoster to get and install a certificate. Or, in case you are hosting yourself, you have to do these steps on your own.

However, keep in mind that this doesn’t magically fix all the problems. After you got your installed certificate and HTTPS running, there is more to check:

• Links on your website should not point to HTTP urls. Make sure any internal link does not start with “http://”. The best way to fix it is not to change http to https, but instead leave out the complete protocol & domain part. This way links will still work, even if you would move back to http or change your domain. You can use www.whynopadlock.com for checking the links on your site.
• Change the url of your Page in WordPress to https://
• When another blog linked to your page, this link will continue to point to the HTTP version. For search engines, your HTTP website is different from the HTTPS site. To prevent losing a good ranking, make sure to redirect from your HTTP to the HTTPS version. This also ensures your visitors will use the secure protocol from now on.

There can be much more, depending on your setup. Read through this detailed guide to see what else might apply in your case. WordPress and a professional web hosting simplifies much of that work. However, most of the time it also limits how far you can go. For my page, I had to wait multiple years until Let’s Encrypt became available. Features like HTTP2 support are still not available.

Now I need to go ahead an fix the links on this site. If you see anything else that is breaking encryption on my site, please tell me in the comments.