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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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