How to make php/html pages secure / https?

Question

I need some secure pages on my site. I've purchased (and my host has installed) a secure certificate for the domain in question.

What does one do at that point? How do I make certain pages secure, do I have to put them in a specific directory? Or use some headers or something? I have no idea how this works.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

Maybe it's much easier than you think. If your provider has installed the certificate, then just call the page with the correct protocoll, that means https://www.example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html .

The difficult part is to make sure, that the page can only be called with the HTTPS protocoll and is not accessible with HTTP. Relative links will use the same protocoll as the originating page.

The easiest way is surely, to make your whole site HTTPS only (you can use relative links then). Some providers offer this option in their control panel. If there is no such option, you can write a .htaccess file and place it in the root direcotry. This lines will redirect any HTTP requests to HTTPS requests:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Of course you should replace example.com with your own domain.