How To Generate An AutoSSL In cPanel With NameHero

Way back towards the end of 2016, we at NameHero decided to offer free SSL certifications via a partnership with Let’s Encrypt. This was at least two years before Google pressured the rest of the web hosting industry into switching to HTTPS for hosting reasons. Like so many other things, NameHero was there well before others followed. In this article, I’ll show you how to generate AutoSSL certificates through the NameHero cPanel interface.

NameHero resellers also have the capability to generate AutoSSL certificates for their clients. The process is the same for both.

Log into cPanel and go to SSL/TLS Status

The first step is to log into cPanel, and search for “SSL/TLS Status”. You can do this either via the browser search, or simply via the search bar on top that will filter out the contents of the icons. Here’s a screenshot of the section you’ll find it in:

Click that and we’ll proceed to the next step.

Select the Items to Which you Want to Apply SSL

The list in the screen below might have a combination of green and red items. If you want to reissue a certificate for one of your shared hosting customers as a reseller, you can revoke them via the WHM interface first.

Select the items in red for which you want to generate a certificate, and click “Run AutoSSL” as shown below:

This will start the certificate generation with the message “AutoSSL” is in progress as shown here:

Keep in mind that this process might take quite a bit of time to complete. It’s important that you don’t close the screen or change anything else while it’s running. The system needs to first verify your ownership, generate the certificates, and do a lot of other stuff in the background, so be patient.

Once it’s completed, all the items that were previously in red, and that you had checked will turn green. Congratulations, you now have an SSL certificate for these sites and can connect to them via HTTPS!

Next Steps

However, your transition to HTTPS has only just begun. While you can now create a connection between a user and your site using SSL, it doesn’t mean that your website will automatically serve up all assets via HTTPS. In fact, you now need to manually make sure that every file URL – whether images, Javascript, or CSS is HTTP enabled.

For example, if you’re using WordPress, there might be some plugins that hard code the paths to their resources located on your site using HTTP. When a browser sees that some resources are being served over HTTP, it creates a “mixed content” warning that displays as a red lock in the address bar and can scare off your users.

In addition, you need to make configuration changes to WordPress to ensure that site URLs and homepage URLs are HTTPS instead of HTTP. One option is to install the plugin “Really Simple SSL” that will take care of the heavy lifting for you, including the above configuration changes.

Personally though, I’m not in favor of plugins to deal with basic configuration issues. So I would suggest you make the configuration changes manually. For example, you can redirect HTTP to HTTPS using the .htaccess file as shown in my earlier tutorial.

From there, systematically upgrade your plugins, or manually change the URLs (if sustainable when the plugin author isn’t updating their code), and take care of all mixed content issues yourself. This way, you’ll save yourself the hassle and performance hit of adding another plugin to an already (possibly) bloated WordPress configuration.