Securing communications with HTTPS

Implementing HTTPS support is becoming an increasingly important requirement in the modern web. Visitors no longer trust online stores that don't secure communications; and all of the major players of the industry are slowly eradicating plain-text transmissions. Facebook, Google, and Twitter now all default to HTTPS. Google has even announced that its search engine would promote websites that offered HTTPS support. There isn't any reason left to skip this part, and Nginx makes it particularly easy. We will thus expand on the example in the previous section and enable HTTPS support on our WordPress site; please note however that the guide remains, regardless of the application you are securing.

Self-signed certificates and certificate authorities

In order to enable HTTPS, we have to obtain an SSL certificate, which will contain information pertaining to the domain name we wish to secure. There are two types of certificates that you may set up for your website...