Install Free SSL Certificate to WordPress on Plesk

Google Chrome has marked all HTTP sites as “not secure” from July, check more from their early blog post and some people also found their website lose ranking in Google search results. That’s why I decided to change my blog from HTTP to HTTPS. But the site is non-business and no income at this stage so I would rater to use some free SSL Certificate.


After research, I found WordPress sites which on Plesk can be easy to do it with free SSL Certificate of “Let’s Encrypt”. The following tells you how to install it to your WordPress site one by one. You just need about 5 minutes and then your site will have an SSL Certificate.

Step 1:

Go to your hosting Plesk panel and find out the site you want to add SSL Certificate. There’s an anchor named “Let’s Encrypt” like the following screenshot, click it to the next step.

Step 2:

Enter your right email address and check the option of “Include www…”, if you use webmail of the domain then you need also check the second checkbox of “Secure…”. And then click the button of “Install”.

After that, Plesk will install a free SSL Certificate automatically. How it easy?

Step 3:

After several minutes, it will back to the site's list screen and with the info message of a successful installation.

Step 4:

And now you may visit your site with https start.

Step 5:

As your sites already have content and links or someone may visit your site without https so you still need to do the further setting to make sure all links start https://waytowp.com can redirect to https://waytowp.com automatically. Here please use a simple plugin and then DO NOT need to edit your .htaccess file.

Sign in your WordPress Dashboard with https such as https://waytowp.com/wp-admin/, you will be asked to sign in again as HTTP and https are take as different sessions. Navigate to your WordPress plugin page by click Plugins –> Add New as the following screenshot.

Enter “really simple SSL” to query the plugin from WordPress’s repository. Click the “Install” button on the first plugin and then you’ll see the “activate” button in 1 minute. Don’t forget to click the “Activate” button when it appears there.

Step 6:

Once the plugin activated you will be navigated and with the following admin notice. Just click the button of “Go ahead, activate SSL”.

That’s all and you may enjoy your site with SSL Certificate now.

Step 7:

If you want to change some redirect settings then you may visit Settings -> SSL in your dashboard. But I suggest you keep default settings if you are not clear what you do.