In this video tutorial I show how to set up an SSL certificate in Cloudflare for WordPress websites. SSL is needed for converting your website from HTTP to HTTPS.
Why you need to use SSL?
- Without SSL visitors to your website will see ⚠️ warning message saying that this website is not secure.
- Avoid mixed content warning that causes strange errors related to CSS and JavaScript.
- If you are already using Cloudflare having SSL on your own host is not enough. You need to enable SSL on CloudFlare server as well (with right options).
- Additionally some browser features like PWA requires HTTPS.
Watch video tutorial on Youtube.
More WordPress speed tutorials playlist.
Three main steps for enabling Cloudflare SSL
- Switch WordPress to HTTPS. Set website URL with https in settings. Find and update all URLs (links, images) inside content to use https version. I show how to use WordPress plugin “Search Regex” for this task.
- Use Cloudflare Proxy. This enables all Cloudflare benefits like DDOS protection, caching, speed optimizations, using latest http versions, CDN etc.
- Select Full encryption mode from SSL settings. Most WordPress websites work in this mode without problem.
That is how you update all HTTP urls to HTTPS in WordPress and choose right SSL settings in Cloudflare.
What is next:
- Leverage Cloudflare cache rules for dynamic WordPress pages.
- Cache static content on Cloudflare CDN.
- Protect WordPress from bad bots and useless crawlers using Cloudflare Firewall.
- In addition to providing user safety with SSL you need to make sure that you website loads fast. Improve page loading speed for WordPress website.