I’m continuing the journey of building this WordPress site in a bit of a hybrid fashion. It is not an “easy button” method like WordPress.com or even a hosting provider’s managed solution. But I also didn’t start with a raw cloud VM somewhere and built the LAMP stack.

This day the big accomplishment is that I FINALLY was able to figure out SSL, get my SSL certificate created and uploaded, and get the sought after “closed lock” when arriving at this site via HTTPS.

SSL Lock Closed – Certificate Valid

It s not like I’m taking credit cards or dealing with any PII (personally identifiable information). But even for casual browsing many browsers now require, or favor, the encrypted connection via HTTPS.

The effort was a challenge. I could have gone with the quick and free auto-configuration option of a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. This method is offered by my current platform provider. I wanted to generate a key, order a certificate, install it, configure it, and launch it. I learn by doing. And hopefully you are now seeing the result of that effort.