CloudFlare recently introduced Universal SSL for all of their customers whether they are on free or paid membership. Including the 2 million sites that have signed up for the free version of their service. For new customers who sign up for CloudFlare’s free plan, after we get through provisioning existing customers, it will take up to 24 hours to activate Universal SSL. As always, SSL for paid plans will be provisioned instantly upon signup.
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, that’s a a way of encrypting communications over a network. This effects a website with a slightly slower connection, HTTPS provides an added layer of security, widely used by e-mail services, financial institutions and social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and more etc..
For all customers, automatically provision a SSL certificate on CloudFlare’s network that will accept HTTPS connections for a customer’s domain and subdomains. Those certificates include an entry for the root domain (e.g., example.com) as well as a wildcard entry for all first-level subdomains (e.g., www.example.com, blog.example.com, etc.). Website that did not have SSL before, it will be serve with default to Flexible SSL mode, which means traffic from browsers to CloudFlare will be encrypted.
As in our previous post we have written about how to speed up your website with CloudFlare. Read it first to get to know and start with CloudFlare, if you haven’t familiar with it. If you already on CloudFlare network then proceed below to setup SSL on your website.
{Benefits using Universal SSL}
Universal SSL means that any site running on CloudFlare gets a free SSL certificate, and is automatically secured over HTTPS. Using SSL for a web site helps make the site more secure, but there’s another benefit: it can also make the site faster. That’s because the SPDY protocol, created by Google to speed up the web, actually requires SSL and only web sites that support HTTPS can use SPDY. CloudFlare has long supported SPDY, and kept up to date with improvements in the protocol. CloudFlare currently support the most recent version of SPDY: 3.1.
If your site is on CloudFlare, and you use a modern browser that supports SPDY, you’ll find that the HTTPS version of your site is now served over SPDY. It allows the browser to query for multiple objects in one request, and for the objects to be sent down the wire as they are ready to prevent hold-ups, that can be a big performance win.
{Let’s Get Started}
Step 1: Login to your CloudFlare dashboard. Pick your desired website on which you want to implement SSL. By using the (gear) icon, goto -> CloudFlare Settings and scroll down to SSL and choose (Flexible SSL) if you haven’t used SSL before on your server. You can also manage custom SSL certificates but for that you have to upgrade your account to paid membership.
If in your SSL section still showing SSL issuing rather than SSL active, then you have to be more patience before you can do any changes with your website. If you implement then possibility you will get mismatch certificates error, when you browse over HTTPS. If you see SSL active on your domain then proceed further.
Step 2 : As now universal SSL active on your domain you can now configure your website. If you use WordPress (self-hosted) then there is a pretty simple option to setup all this via WordPress HTTPS (SSL) plugin.
WordPress HTTPS is intended to be an all-in-one solution to using SSL on WordPress sites. Installed it and activate the plugin. Now you all setup to use SSL on your website, click on Force SSL Administration and leave other settings as default as it is and Save Changes. Now your admin section always serve with secure environment.
Step 3: If you want to configure your SSL everywhere on your website, then you have to create Page Rules from CloudFlare dashboard. Login to your CloudFlare dashboard and click on the (gear) icon, then select Page rules.
After that you have to create page rules by Add new rule and enter (yourwebsite.com/*) as mention below in image. Switch on Always use https and Add rule. Now your new rule saved, it may take around 60 seconds to implement new changes. Now you will see https everywhere on your site.
After done all setting correctly you will see green lock icon on your browser, but still some links, images or files may be serve with http and this cause mixed content warning in your browser. Means you’re loading files over HTTP within the page that is HTTPS.
To get the green lock icon you’ll want to go through your page code and make sure things like images and JavaScript files are being loaded specifically over HTTPS. This will then display the green lock icon in the browser.
Step 4 : To Fix some common problems with insecure content on pages using SSL, there is a plugin which help you solve this issue very easily. Install SSL Insecure Content Fixer and activate the plugin, you don’t have to do any settings after installing. This will mostly fixes CSS and JavaScript links that don’t use SSL.
Step 5 : Done..Now you successfully activated the CloudFlare Universal SSL on your domain. Rock On!
