I have configured my site JT30.COM to use HTTPS. I used my CloudFlare account. My hosting company charges $200 to configure SSL on my site, so the free CloudFlare account is for me.
I am configuring SSL to 1) see how it interacts with my spam software, and 2) improve my website’s page rank with Google who now gives extra points for SSL.
The setup went easy. I configured on CloudFlare. CloudFlare told me that I had to change my DNS so I did it. Luckily I had not actually visited the JT30.COM site today, so I did not have to worry about cached DNS. Sometimes you have to wait a few hours for DNS to refresh.
After I finished configuring CloudFlare I pinged the site and it showed that CloudFlare was working. I went to the site and it was still there. I tried HTTPS://www.jt30.com and it was not working correctly. The web page showed http: resources such as CSS files that were not loading on the https: site.
I tried changing the WordPress settings to HTTPS for the site address and hung up immediately with a redirect loop error.
I had to log into PHPMyAdmin through the host panel and manually fix the wp-options table to get it back to http.
I then tried the CloudFlare SSL plugin. After installing it I tried https: and it worked. I then changed the site URL to https and that worked.
So it only took about 10 minutes to switch over and the only minor hiccup was WordPress trying to do endless redirects when I turned on https. The plugin stopped that right away.
The secure icon has an exclamation point because there is no Site Information configured. I assume this is a CloudFlare issue so I have to research that.
Now I will monitor the traffic and see it it improves as Google finds out that I did this.
I will watch the spam statistics and see if I get any errors from JT30.com.
If I go a week without major crashes, I will start switching over other sites to HTTPS.