How to activate the free Cloudflare SSL

One of the great features of the Cloudflare service is the support of free SSL certificate on even the free plan they provide.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and its main purpose is to secure the communication between you - the client and the server hosting your website. The secure connection to your website is a mandatory these days due to the fact that this will provide you and your visitors with a safe and secured browsing experience. Typically SSL is mostly used on login pages, contact us pages and especially on E-Commerce checkout pages. The data your visitors input on the mentioned pages is safely transmitted to the server using the level of Encryption the SSL service provides.

The Cloudflare Universal SSL certificate is an SSL certificate provided absolutely free of charge to everyone who would like to use that type of SSL certificate for securing the connection to their website absolutely free of charge.

The way how that SSL certificate work is that it encrypts the transmitted data between a visitor on your website and the Cloudflare service on its most basic form. The requirement for using that type of SSL certificate is only one and it is a mandatory:

• Changing your domain Nameservers to those provided by Cloudflare

Check out our how to Change the Nameservers in your Client Area guide if you are not familiar with the process.

Now you will only have to access the Crypto icon located at the top of your client area. The option you are looking for here is Flexible SSL as the other options will require from you to have an existing SSL certificate and also those are only available on the paid plans Cloudflare provides.

Once you activate that option you will need to provide a period of 24 hours in which the SSL certificate you will provided with will be issued and activated by Cloudflare. That is all! Congratulations! You can now configure the free Universal CloudFLare SSL certificate on any of the configured domains you have in your Cloudflare Client area.