Protecting Your Website With an SSL Certificate

If you want to secure your website with an SSL certificate, you can use a certificate you already own. You can also purchase an SSL certificate directly through Plesk, generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR for short) to purchase one from a Certification Authority, or protect your website with a free self-signed SSL certificate.

To secure your website with a certificate you already own, you need to upload it first. To do so, go to Websites & Domains and click SSL Certificates > Add SSL Certificate.

Type in the certificate name (you will use it to identify the certificate among other certificates), then upload it as described below:

• If you store the certificate in the form of the *.key and the *.crt files, scroll down to the Upload the certificate files section and upload the files. If both the certificate and the private key parts of your certificate are contained in a *.pem file, just upload it twice, both as the private key and the certificate. Click Upload Certificate when you have finished.
• If you store the certificate as text, scroll down to the Upload the certificate as text section and paste the certificate and the private key parts into the corresponding fields. Click Upload Certificate when you have finished.

This will result in the certificate being placed in your repository. You can see the list of all SSL certificates in your repository by going to Websites & Domains > SSL Certificates.

Now that the certificate has been generated, you need to install it. Go to Websites & Domains and click Hosting Settings. Select the SSL support checkbox, select the certificate you have just uploaded from the Certificate menu, and click OK.