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How to Make Sure Your Website Is Secure With SSL and HTTPS
How to Make Sure Your Website Is Secure With SSL and HTTPS

This article will go through the steps for making sure your website is secure with SSL and HTTPS

Thrive Themes avatar
Written by Thrive Themes
Updated over a week ago

Issue

It may happen that you encounter an error message when you try to set up the API connection between your Thrive Themes account and Zapier, saying that you need to make sure your website is secure. This means that your website needs to have a valid SSL certificate and it has to work properly on the "https" protocol. If it does not, then you cannot set up the connection.

Why is this needed? What is SSL?

An SSL (which is short for Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard technology that ensures a secure internet connection between two systems (e.g. a website and a browser). With the help of SSL an encrypted link can be created between the two systems.

This encrypted link will ensure that all the confidential/sensitive data (e.g. login details, addresses, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.) transferred/passed between the website and the browsers is secure. This basically means that if your website has an SSL applied to it then, every sign up/online transaction it has with customers will be safe and protected.

If a website does not have SSL, then the data will be sent in plain text between the two systems, so anyone can easily intercept and access it. However, with SSL the data is encrypted, so even if someone intercepts it, they will not be able to decipher the data.

Now, in order for a webserver to create such an SSL connection, it requires an SSL certificate.

This can be obtained from a Certification Authority such as SSL.com. There, you need to apply for activating SSL on your website. This process starts with providing information about your website/company and entails more aspects, like getting cryptographic keys, validating your details, and finally getting your SSL certificate, so that your website can use SSL.

After you have obtained an SSL certificate you will see two things change when you view your website, as explained below:

  • In the URL of the website, instead of the simple HTTP, which is the protocol your website has been using before, you will see HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure). This "S" is an indicator that your website is secure, having a valid SSL certificate and that it works properly on the "https" protocol.

  • Furthermore, a lock symbol/icon will appear in the browser bar, next to the URL of your website. If someone clicks on this lock symbol/icon, the details of the SSL certificate will be displayed.

Solution

If you have encountered an error message regarding the security of your website, then you can do one of the following two things to solve this error:

1. Obtain the SSL certificate yourself If you are familiar with how to get an SSL certificate for your website, from a Certification Authority, then you can do this by yourself.

Once you have obtained the certificate, you will be able to create the Zapier connection. Simply go to your WordPress admin dashboard, then access your Thrive Dashboard and start following the steps to set this up.

2. Ask your hosting company to get an SSL certificate for your website If you are not familiar with the procedure of getting SSL certificates for websites, then, you can contact your website hosting company and ask them to do this for you.

After they get the certificate and you are sure that your website is secure, you can create the API connection with Zapier, just as described here.

Hopefully, you have found this article useful. If so, please reward it with a smile below :)

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