Cloudflare offers many benefits:
- There’s the CDN which makes your site faster to reach in different locations.
- There’s the caching system which makes it even faster.
- There’s a free shared VALID SSL which is why I’m writing this post.
How to set it up in a few simple steps:
- Open a Cloudflare account (wait up to 24 hours for the certificate to be generated). Add your domain and point its DNS records to Cloudflare
- Try using https on your site – it already works!! Do you have mixed content served or you wish to force https always?
- If you have a WordPress site I recommend installing the Cloudflare plug-in
- Go to your Cloudflare account and click the “Crypto” icon at the top menu
- SSL should be set to “Flexible”
- Force https by turning on “Always use HTTPS”
- Avoid mixed content by turning on “Automatic HTTPS Rewrites”
- Read the SEO section in my “Moving any website from HTTP to HTTPS – securing your site for visitors while improving SEO” post
Good luck and I’m here to help!