By default, we give all the WordPress environments on our platform a free SSL certificate. To request a certificate from Let’s Encrypt (or any Certificate Authority), you need to provide some kind of proof that you are entitled to receive the certificate for a given domain. We can only start the validation if the DNS records are set correctly.

The system automatically detects when the DNS is set correctly and will request an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt for your domains. The certificate will automatically be installed and if the ‘redirect to https://’ is set your website will be reachable via SSL.

Let’s Encrypt logo

It is possible that your WordPress site may be looking strange or you get a redirect loop after getting SSL. There could be two things wrong:

– You need to empty the cache because there are still links to http:// in the cached pages
– You need to do a find and replace over the database to change all http:// links to https://. Instead of doing a find and replace you can also install a plugin called Really Simple SSL.

There is also an option to install a more advanced (custom) certificate. Read more about custom (bought) SSL certificates in this article.