PWA with WordPress Without Coding— Part 2/6

HTTPS on shared hosting:

HTTPS is a requisite technology for PWAs to work. PWAs don’t work in absence of HTTPS.

Getting an SSL Certificate:
Getting an SSL certificate is easy if your hosting solution supports certbot, a LetsEncrypt client.

However, we have a Hostgator multi-domain shared hosting subscription. It does not yet support a proper LetsEncrypt client, even after 2 years of users asking HostGator for it.

C-panel to the rescue, and kudos to Hostgator for implementing SNI(Server Name Indication), We were able to work around this caveat with some effort.

LetsEncrypt Client Options Offers many alternative ACME clients. We have to use one of the available browser clients:

Browser ACME clients that offer LetsEncrypt certificate generation

We use the services of https://www.sslforfree.com/ to get our certificates.

there is an SSL/TLS panel in my Cpanel

• Press Manage SSL sites in C-Panel

there is this setting under it

• Delete the existing self-signed certificates,
• Paste the credentials and pressed the install certificate button

pick a domain -> add your keys -> install certificate.

Repeat for all the domains in our network, and we have SSL working everywhere. This process needs to be repeated every 90 days so we need to keep looking for ways to automate this.

Not having automatic LetsEncrypt support should be a deal-breaker in 2018

We now somehow need to redirect all “http” requests to “https”. There exists a really simple(pun intended :-p) plugin for the purpose.

• Install Really Simple SSL plugin, and “Network Activate” it.

Really Simple SSL is simple way to enable SSL everywhere

• Enable SSL network-wide and save changes.

In SSL setting, all you need to do is enable SSL network-wide

Repeating the above steps, we have https working on all of the websites of our network.

In the next part, we will pick and add themes and plugins to our WordPress Installation.

Series Index:

• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 1/6
  Introduction
  https://medium.com/@raveeshagarwal/making-a-pwa-with-wordpress-from-scratch-part-1-sans-code-69c1b9cbf955
• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 2/6
  HTTPS On Shared Hosting
  <here>
• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 3/6
  Adding Themes and Plugins
  https://medium.com/@raveeshagarwal/making-a-pwa-with-wordpress-without-code-part-2-14eec9349a3
• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 4/6
  Design/Wireframing
  https://medium.com/@raveeshagarwal/making-a-pwa-with-wordpress-without-code-part-3-1355bf8320a2
• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 5/6
  The Home Page
  https://medium.com/@raveeshagarwal/making-a-pwa-with-wordpress-without-code-part-4-4a024606d04f
• Making a PWA with WordPress Without Code — Part 6/6
  End Results
  https://medium.com/@raveeshagarwal/making-a-pwa-with-wordpress-without-code-part-5-8290b0077132