Must Read
Many domain name registration or hosting companies offer free coupons for cheap SSL certificates, you can also use GoDaddy and Name cheap to enjoy free coupons monthly. Now, are you ready? Let's check out its benefits and how you can enable it and make your Blogger blog more secure and Google friendly.
Before using Free SSL certificate for your blog, you need to know what exactly is SSL and how can it benefit you.
WHAT IS SSL CERTIFICATE?
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer and this ensures the security of a website with a user or visitor. We usually do the online transactions, fill our personal information in desired forms and so we do to send our information to the web servers. So we need a secure connection in order to protect our data and this is where the SSL certificate matters. With SSL certificate, HTTPS establishes an encrypted connection between a web server and a user, so any third person can't access the particular information.
Moreover, most of the sites have a unique SSL Certificate and this helps in identifying a secure connection. Any site that is pretending to have a secure SSL, HTTPS connection, and its certificate is not verified or does not match then your browser will show a warning message.
EFFECT OF SSL ON WEBSITE RANKING AND TRAFFIC:
You must know that Google gives a slight boost to the rank of sites which are HTTPS enabled. But surely Google will increase the effect of this “boost” and of course, even a slight boost in SERP is essential to overcome our competitors.
Please Keep Following Points in mind before enabling SSL (HTTPS) :
=> Your traffic will be down for few days until Google correctly indexes all your URLs with HTTPS. During this process, if you make any mistake, then your blog can go down. So make these changes on such time when no or very few readers or visitor are reading your blog.
You’ll have to remove all the widgets that are hosted/attached to non-SSL hosts as they won't work. I will surely provide the details of all the necessary changes in future posts .
Roughly, a basic SSL certificate costs about $10/year but now, Blogger offers a free SSL to all its Blogger users. No matter if your blog is hosted on Blogspot, Blogger has released free SSL (https) Certificate for Custom Domains too. So from now, you can easily get free SSL certificate directly from Blogger.
1. Sign in to Blogger
2. Now, Select a blog on which you would like to enable HTTPS.
3. Go to Settings > Basic > HTTPS Settings.
4. In HTTPS Availability, select YES.
It might take some time to enable HTTPS (SSL) on your blog. So wait for few minutes and let another HTTPS redirect option be ready for enabling. This is the message you might get after enabling HTTPS Availability
5. HTTPS redirect will help you in getting your HTTP traffic redirect to your new secured HTTPS server, so don't forget to wait sometime before you enable it.
Congrats! Now your blog has a unique SSL certificate which will surely enhance your SERP and provide an extra layer of security to your blog. Now check your blog with https:// and enjoy free SSL support from blogger dancing on your blogger custom domain enabled blog.subdomain or a custom domain.
I hope this tutorial was helpful to you. Please hit the share button to share with friends on social networks.
