How to Enable HTTPS in Thelia

As with each other eCommerce platform, when it comes to Thelia, it’s critical that you make sure your visitors/consumers trust you. One of the main ways to protect user data is by having a secured (HTTPS) connection on your website. Without such a connection, you would not be protecting users from malicious attackers. In this post, we will share some information on a specific problem that may occur while trying to set up the HTTPS connection for your Thelia website, as well as how to address that problem easily.

Table of Contents:

• The Problem: A Warning May Occur
• The Solution: Enable Secured Connection to your Website
• Get a Valid SSL Certificate
• Force HTTPS Connection

The Problem: A Warning May Occur

When trying to make your Thelia website work with HTTPS, there is a warning that may occur - “Your connection is not private.” The reason for that warning is a missing active SSL certificate for your domain. An SSL certificate is required in order to access any website with the secured HTTPS protocol.

To have an SSL certificate on your domain, you need to consider two main things.

The Solution: Enable Secured Connection to your Website

Get a Valid SSL Certificate

First, you need to get a valid SSL on your domain. There are four ways to get such a certificate with FastComet:

• Install Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate or AutoSSL certificate;
• Install Cloudflare Universal SSL Certificate;
• Get a Personal 256bit SSL Certificate. It is provided by Comodo, and you can obtain one from your Client Area → Products → Order → Product Addons. This type of SSL is a paid service, and if you decide to purchase it, our team will configure it for you. 

Force HTTPS Connection

Without forcing HTTPS as the only way of connecting to your website, users will be able to utilize HTTP if they simply write your domain in the address bar of their browser or access bookmarked HTTP-based links. 

To force the HTTPS connection, you need to access the location of your Thelia website on your account. You can do so via an FTP client like FileZilla or by directly using the File Manager within your cPanel account. Locate and open the .htaccess file for editing and enter the following lines at the top of the file (replace example.com with your domain's name):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/web/$1 [R,L]

For more on how to configure that, you can also review our excellent Enable SSL in Thelia tutorial, which will provide more detailed information on the process for you.

Conclusion

The easiest way for eCommerce sites to protect sensitive data is by using SSL certificates. The secure (encrypted) connection is crucial for your Thelia website because having an unencrypted connection would be putting all your customers and their personal data at risk. In general, SSL certificates are inexpensive (or free) and pay for themselves many times over in the long run.