How to use Cloudflare to move your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS
In my post, I show you step by step how to move your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS for free using Cloudflare. Cloudflare offers free SSL certificates, SSL certificates are needed to move to HTTPS.
If you have a website then you must have HTTPS, this tells web browsers and your visitors, that your WordPress site is secure.
If your blog doesn’t have HTTPS, chances are that browsers are showing your visitors a warning page that your site is not secure.
Once you have moved your WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS, you will have a green secure padlock in the address bar.
When I started blogging I did not know that to get a green secure padlock, you had to move your site from HTTP to HTTPS. Now I do, and I am going to show you how you can move your WordPress blog, too.
Let’s move your WordPress site to HTTPS.
- Sign up for a free account on Cloudflare
- Add your site to Cloudflare
- Choose your Cloudflare plan
- Change your nameservers
- Activate the Really Simple SSL plugin
- Conclusion
Sign up for a free account on Cloudflare
Step 1. Sign up for a free account on Cloudflare.
On Cloudflare’s homepage, select the ‘Sign up’ link.
Enter your email address and create a password for your account.
Add your site to Cloudflare
Step 2. Add your WordPress site to Cloudflare.
After you sign in to your account, click on the ‘Add a site’ link.
On the next page, enter the URL of your WordPress site. For example, for my site, I would enter ‘Newblogr.com’. Then, select ‘Add site’.
Cloudflare will scan your site to check DNS records. During the scan, you will get the following message, click ‘Next’.
Choose your Cloudflare plan
Step 3. Choose your Cloudflare plan
Cloudflare has both free and paid plans, to secure your site, you can use the free plan. Click on ‘Free’ then select ‘Confirm plan’.
On the next page, confirm you are subscribing to the free plan.
After you click on ‘Confirm’, Cloudflare will complete the scan of your site to get the information it needs.
Once completed, Cloudflare asks you to check for missing records. I have never had an issue with missing records after a scan.
Scroll to the bottom of this page and click on the link to continue.
Change your nameservers
Step 4. Change your nameservers.
On the next page, Cloudflare informs you that to activate your account, you must change your nameservers.
Your nameservers for your website are located in the account of the company you purchased your domain name.
For example, I purchased ‘Newblogr.com’ from Namecheap. Therefore, I need to go to Namecheap.com and sign in to my account, to update my nameservers.
Here is my account dashboard on Namecheap. You can see Newblogr.com on my dashboard.
To change nameservers on Namecheap, click on ‘Manage’.
On the next page, search for ‘Nameservers’.
On the right are my two current nameservers. I have an account with Cloudflare, so my nameservers are already updated.
To change your nameservers, copy and paste the two nameservers given by Cloudflare earlier in this tutorial, over your existing nameservers.
Once you change your nameservers, save the changes. After you save, you will get a message to tell you that the update will take up to 48 hours to complete.
In my experience, the update completes quicker than 48 hours.
How to check nameserver update progress
On the process starts, you can check the progress of the update at www.whatsmydns.net. On this page, enter your site URL into the box, change the drop-down menu to ‘NS’, then select ‘Search.
The blue text is your nameservers. As the update continues, more and more will change to your new nameservers. As you can see from the screenshot, my nameservers are from Cloudflare.
You don’t have to wait for the update to complete before you change to HTTPS. Once Cloudflare detects you have changed your nameservers, your account is active.
Let’s move on the final step.
Activate the Really Simple SSL plugin
Step 5. Install and activate the Really Simple SSL plugin.
There are settings on your WordPress site that need to change to move your site from HTTP to HTTPS. The easiest way to do the change is to use the Really Simple SSL plugin.
Once activated, the plugin detects you have an SSL certificate and will make the changes for you.
Go to the plugin library on WordPress admin.
Select ‘Add New’ to go to the library. In the search for plugins box, type ‘Really Simple SSL’.
Select ‘Install now’, and then ‘Activate’.
After you click on ‘Activate’. The plugin will check your site for an SSL certificate.
To complete the change, click on the ‘Go ahead activate SSL’ link. Now your site has completed the move from HTTP to HTTPS.
If you have registered your site in Google Analytics as an HTTP site, you should go back to update that to HTTPS.
If you are new to WordPress, I recommend you always run a backup of your site before you make any changes. This ensures that if you do something wrong and your site has issues, you can restore your site with ease.
If you are unsure of how to run a backup of your site. Please check out my ‘How to backup your WordPress site‘ post.
Conclusion
Now you have secured your site with an SSL certificate. Website browsers won’t show an unsecured site warning to your visitors.
Cloudflare makes the move from HTTP to HTTPS easy, follow my step by step tutorial, and you will have a secure WordPress website in less than ten minutes.
Google and Bing give preference to secure sites in their rankings. Therefore, if you haven’t moved your site to HTTPS yet, I suggest you do that next. It takes just a few minutes.
Before you go to set up your free Cloudflare account, would you kindly spare one minute to leave me a comment? I would love to know if you found my post useful. Did it help you move from HTTP to HTTPS?
If you have any questions about my post, or moving from HTTP to HTTPS, let me know in the comments. I look forward to reading them.
