Get Free SSL With CloudFlare (Part II)

You’ll need to Get Free SSL With Cloudflare even if you aren’t going to use a payment gateway. For one it will make users safer, and also stop some methods hackers use to takeover websites. Another reason is because eventually during the process of logging in to wordpress, you’ll trigger a false malware issue.

This is frustrating and will cause visitors to not want to visit your site. If this ends up happening to you, you can report it as a false positive in the Google Webmaster Tool. Learn my past mistakes, wait till you have ssl to develop your site lol!

The bottom line is any device can use encryption, it’s because of greedy bastards you gotta pay for it. Well, you don’t actually have to lol, because there are work arounds! I’ll list the options I’ve discovered, there are probably others in addition to them:

• 1. Let’s Encrypt
• 2. StartSSL Free
• 3. gethttpsforfree.com
• 4. Cloudflare (The one I’ll be using in this Tutorial)

Yes,Because you are just starting out, you wont build up enough traffic to exceed their limits. Even if your a famous porn star, you wont accumulate enough traffic to exceed any limitations with x10. Once you have registered your free accounts with Freenom, and X10hosting.com we need to direct our name servers.

Easy enough, log into Freenom, select services and click my domains. Then click Manage Domain, Management Tools, and Nameservers so we can set them. Be sure to change the bullet point to use custom nameservers because it wont update otherwise.

As you can see in the image below, I have removed two of the nameservers and replaced two. Because I’m such a nice guy i’ll drop them here for easy copy and paste 😄 It usually takes 5 to 10 minutes for the process to complete. You shouldn’t run nto to much difficulty, because it is easy to Get Free SSL With CloudFlare

• ns1.x10hosting.com (198.91.80.2)

• ns2.x10hosting.com (108.178.57.230)

Initially, Because of the new layout X10hosting created, the default Cpanel sucks. In order to restore a decent Cpanel once you are in, change the theme at with top menu option.

So now that we have the option visible to us, go ahead and install WordPress. Don’t select the https or the https://wwww option, because this can increase risk of being locked out of WordPress.

Once we have installed wordpress and confirmed it it functions properly we can now setup Cloudflare.

Pointing Name Servers To Get Free SSL With CloudFlare

So we’ll begin by simply entering our website and about a minute later choose the free. The DNS information you can just continue, if it’s wrong you can fix it later. The next screen should be the two Nameservers needed to replace our web hosts in Freenom. Once you have replaced the two name servers, We need to install two plugins.

In WordPress They can be Found under the add plugin option. The two we will be needing so we can Get Free SSL With CloudFlare:

• Cloudflare
• Cloudflare Flexible SSL

Installing and activating them will suffice. While waiting for the SSL. Because of the propagation process it can take as little as a few hours, and as much as a couple days.

Cloudflare summarized is a content delivery network, however unlike others it works like a proxy. Basically because all the content is cached on their end, they stand between your server and the user. A very powerful ally because of many reasons:

• Stop attacks directed at a website.
• Dynamically modify content in order to improve performance.
• Insert applications into web pages.
• Provide rich analytics on all the requests to your website.
• Automatically determine what objects are static and cacheable at the network’s edge without any user configuration.
• Provide a network gateway between protocols like IPv6 & IPv4.
• Make installing SSL flexible and one-click easy.
• And many more things a traditional CDN can’t provide.

The settings that are essential in cloud We will go ahead and cover. If your load time is under 2 seconds, in my opinion setting up something time consuming like w3 is stupid. IT is certainly a good idea to ensure GZIP compression is functioning, because thats ranking factor. It’s also a good idea to stop directory browsing because that is a security issue. In order to locate your htaccess file in your websites root directory, be sure to have show hidden files selected. My current theme does not require GZIP, but because you might need it, i’ll include that snippet as well:

I wont be doing browser caching in this tutorial because that is a tutorial in and of itself. Plus if your not making a really top heavy site, you don’t need it.
The settings in CloudFlare are straight forward, because the majority are set up for you like the medium SSL.in click the top 3 auto minify check boxes, You can use rocketloader and AMP as you choose. I have found some themes beneficial however it can slow down machines, and  amp pisses off google if wrong.

The  page rules that you will need to set are pretty simple:

http://*.yoursite.<suffix>/* the suffix set to whatever yours is com net etc. this rule will be https always.

https://*.yoursite.<suffix>/* Cache level  cache everything and set it for last.

Congratulations! You are the official owner of a website, 3 email accounts with that domain and it was 100% FREE! Now the real fun begins, because after we put our site in Google/Bing/Yandex, its time to develop our site!