How to add free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt to WordPress on AWS
Adding SSL certificates to your website is now important. This will enable your visitors to communicate with your website securely. Since Google now consider SSL as one of its ranking factors, this implementation will help improve your SEO ranking.
The following instruction is for WordPress site on AWS that was deployed using Bitnami stack.
Step 1: Login to your AWS server using a SSH client
Step 2: Install Git
sudo apt-get install git
Step 3: Install the Certbot Client
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot
Step 4: Generate SSL certificate using Certbot client. Remember to replace example.com with your actual domain
cd certbot
./certbot-auto certonly --webroot -w /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/htdocs/ -d example.com
You will be asked to provide some basic information such as your email and agree to the terms of service. Your certificates will be generated and placed at the following location
/etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/
Step 5: Backup the Apache default certificates
sudo mv /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.crt /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.crt.backup
sudo mv /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.key /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.key.backup
Step 6: Link your SSL certificate and certificate key to Apache certificate directory
sudo ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.crt
sudo ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server.key
Step 7: Update permission for certificates
sudo chown root:root /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server*
sudo chmod 600 /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/server*
Step 8: Restart Apache server
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
Now, you can check if you can securely connect to your website by typing your website with the https:// in the browser address bar. It should work.
For SEO improvement, you can also redirect your visitors to https:// from http://. You can follow the tutorial on how to redirect http to https
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