How do I make my website secure?

It’s now critically important that your website should be secure and those running a non secure website may well find themselves being penalised by Google. The good news is that if you have a WordPress site, its relatively simple to put the site secure and you can do it yourself within a few easy steps.

You will also take advantage of a content delivery network which speeds up your site so double bonus. Please note these instructions only apply to self-hosted WordPress sites.

1. Sign up to a Cloudflare free account
2. Login to your domain name provider and take a note of the settings in the DNS.
3. Copy and paste these details into Cloudflare if it hasnt automatically picked them all up.
4. Take a note of your current nameserver settings so you can revert if necessary and then change your nameserver settings in your domain name provider to the ones provided in Cloudflare
5. Your site is now running through Cloudflare but you will need to wait approximately 24 hours (while Cloudflare issues the free certificate) and then test that your site works with https:// in front of it
6. Back your site up before progressing to the next step
7. When your site works when you type in https://yoursitename and it shows a padlock in the bar, install the plugin “one click ssl”. This plugin forces the site secure and does all the hard work for you.
8. Activate and run the SSL plugin
9. Log out and log back in again and your site should be fully secure
10. Check to make sure that you can only access https:// URLs so try removing the s out of https:// on any URL as it should automatically redirect back to the https:// version