Hi together,

todays post is regarding SSL certificates for your websites. I think many of you have the question if it is necessary to use SSL cerficates for websites, which advantages or disadvantages does the usage of SSL certificats have.

This post gives you a short overview and a short introduction how to use free SSL certificates for your websites.

Pro and Contra for SSL on Websites

Pros

Confidence

For every site processing data which is entered by the visitors SSL ist a must-have. If you enter data on a website please check if is is using SSL, if the issuer is trustable and guarantees the reliability of the operator.

Privacy

SSL encrypted connections prohibit that the data which is exchanged can be read along. This means better privacy for the users of your website.

This is very important when login data or payment details are exchanged.

SEO Advantages

For your Search Engine Optimization activities it is better to offer SSL to your website visitors – google is ranking pages which are using SSL higher.

More informations can be found at google: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

Cons

In my opinion there are not really any issues against using SSL for websites. The complexity of the networks which are supporting SSL was an issue in the past and modern networks are supporting SSL in standard.

Page Speed

There is a myth, that SSL is slowing down websites, this is not correct. If you have many visitors, the utilization of your CPU can be higher handling SSL connections – but I think for most of the websites this is not a problem. If you have so many visitors then it would be helpful to increase the CPU Power of your webserver.

Price of Certificates

In the past the price for the certificates was quite high. But today you have organizations like “let’s encrypt” which offer free certificates. The following guide shows you how to use a free certificate from let’s encrypt.

Howto SSL with Apache and Ubuntu

The following example shows how to add SSL to a webserver based on Ubuntu and Apache. It is very easy to add a SSL certificate which is trusted by the current browsers using the certbot.

Prerequisite for the usage is a correctly configured Apache webserver with enabled SSL module.

Step 1 – install certbot

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-certbot-apache

Step 2 – create certificate

The following command guids you to create the certificates and add it automatically to your apache configuration.

$ sudo certbot --apache

Alternative way to create certificate

$ sudo certbot certonly --cert-name <cert_name> -d <web_url> --webroot -w /var/www/html/ --force-renewal

When using the alternative way you have to configure the vhost and assign the certificate files in Apache manually

Step 3 – Check Result

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5 – Renew Certificate

The “let’s encrypt” certificate is only valid for 3 months, so you have to renew the certificate every 3 months manually by using the following command.

$ sudo certbot certonly --cert-name <cert_name> -d <web_url> --webroot -w /var/www/html/ --force-renewal

Step 6 – Renew Certificate automatically in background

Step 6 is optional to renew the certificate automatically in background.

The easiest way to do this is to start the command via cron:

$ crontab -e

Add the command and execute it every month at the first day:

# m h dom mon dow command
01 00 01 * * certbot certonly --cert-name <cert_name> -d <web_url> --webroot -w /var/www/html/  --force-renewal

The command will be executed every first day of a month on 00:01 a.m. – so all certificates which are relevant for renewing are renewed.

Dont’t forget to reload your apache webserver afterwards… 🙂