SSL for your sites

Serving your site over HTTPS — the padlock in the address bar — is a single setting in your control panel, not a project. You don't buy a certificate, you don't upload anything, and you don't run any commands. You switch Encryption on for a site, save, and a minute later your site is live on HTTPS with a real, browser-trusted certificate that renews itself from then on.

The certificates come from Let's Encrypt, free of charge, and your account manages the whole lifecycle for you — requesting the certificate when you enable HTTPS, keeping it covering all your domains, and renewing it well before it expires. It all happens in the same web control panel you use for your sites: no root, no shell, nothing to install.

In this topic

• HTTPS for your sites — turning HTTPS on for a site step by step, the one bit of DNS you have to get right first, what happens when you add aliases or rename a site later, and when a job (like installing your own purchased certificate) is one to hand to your host.

Where to go next

• The aliases a certificate has to cover, and how to point them at your server in DNS, are under Managing sites & platforms.
• The exact task and setting names are collected in the shared Reference.