Congratulations! You’ve decided to set up a Web site.

The site might be for your personal use, for sharing family pictures, for a blog, for an SaaS application, or any number of other possibilities. In all of those cases, people will access your site using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP has evolved and improved through the years, but one thing about it hasn’t changed—the fact that all of the traffic sent on an HTTP connection is unencrypted.

If you’re running a personal site, this doesn’t really matter. But if and when you’re interested in doing something a bit more exciting, you might well want or need to add encryption to your server. Encrypted HTTP is known as HTTPS, and it involves the addition of SSL/TLS encryption to the HTTP protocol. In order for your site to handle encrypted connections, you need to install and configure an SSL certificate. This Geek Guide is here to help you through that process, making it easy for you to move an existing site using HTTP into one using HTTPS.