SSL Certificate Setup
Secure Your Website With An SSL Certificate
Securing your website with an SSL certificate is now essential to gaining the trust of your potential customers. In July 2018, Google started marking websites without an SSL certificate as ‘not secure’ as part of its ongoing efforts to create a secure internet. If your website does not have an SSL certificate and is not served over a secure (https) connection, it will trigger a not secure warning in Google Chrome.
We want to make securing your website with an SSL certificate as easy as possible with our SSL setup service. As SEO experts, the service we offer includes every step required to successfully migrate to a secure website and maximise the SEO benefits that it can bring. Find out more about our setup process.
Our Proven SSL Certificate Setup Process
STEP ONE:
EVALUATE WEBSITE
Every website is different and we like to be sure that we have accounted for any specific requirements that your website may have.
At this stage we will check your website and perform some tests to ascertain the best type of SSL certificate for your website, whether it is a free Let’s Encrypt Certificate or a premium certificate from a trusted certificate authority.
STEP TWO:
INSTALL SSL CERTIFICATE
Once we have checked your website and decided on a suitable SSL certificate we will install the certificate on your website’s hosting package/server.
As part of the installation process we will test the installed SSL certificate with industry leading SSL testing software to ensure that it complies with all the relevant security standards.
STEP THREE:
MIGRATE THE WEBSITE TO HTTPS
After the SSL certificate has been installed and tested, we will migrate your website so it runs over a https secured connection.
In order to migrate the website to https we will change the URLs/links on each of your website pages and add a http to https redirect. This ensures that all of your website visitors view your website through a secure connection.
STEP FOUR:
FIX MIXED CONTENT ERRORS
After a website has been migrated to https, it is common to find resources such as images, videos and css files that are still loaded over an insecure http connection. These resources will break the secure connection to the website and stop the secure padlock from being shown.
We will check your website to ensure that all your resources are loaded over a secure https connection. This prevents any mixed content errors and maintains the all important secure encrypted connection that your website visitors will expect.
STEP FIVE:
INFORM GOOGLE OF THE MIGRATION
The final step of a successful migration to https is to inform Google that your website has been migrated to https. To do this, we will create a new https property for your website in Google Search Console and re-generate your website’s sitemap so it only includes the secure website links.
After this, we will submit the sitemap via Google Search Console. By submitting a sitemap, it will encourage Google to index the https pages of your website. If you have a GoogleMyBusiness profile this will be updated with your new website link.