If you have a domain that isn’t managed by Yola, but you still want to secure it with SSL, you’ll need to sign up with Cloudflare. Cloudflare then assigns two Nameservers to the domain, which need to be added to your domain’s DNS records in your registrar’s control panel.
You can then follow the steps below to complete the process:
1. Sign up for a Cloudflare account here. If you've already signed up, you can log in here.
2. You should see a message that says You currently don't have any websites:
3. Click on the blue Add Site button.
4. Enter your domain name and click Next.
5. Select the Free plan:
6. Cloudflare will assign two nameservers to your domain. As an example, these nameserver records could be given as tegan.ns.cloudflare.com and will.ns.cloudflare.com.
7. To redirect traffic for all subdomains and hosts in your domain, enable the Always Use HTTPS feature in the Edge Certificates tab of the Cloudflare SSL/TLS app:
Alternatively, if you don't want your whole site redirected to HTTPS, you can redirect on a URL basis using the Cloudflare Page Rules app.
While protecting your site via Cloudflare, it is not recommended to perform redirects at your origin web server:
- Page Rule redirects are processed at the Cloudflare edge, resulting in a quicker response and reduced requests to your server
- Origin web server redirects can cause redirect loop errors.
When configuring Page Rules, the Always use HTTPS action is the simplest method to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS. You can also use the Forwarding URL action with a 301 redirect if you need to redirect to another subdomain in addition to forcing HTTPS. For example, a Page Rule match for http://example.com/* with a Forwarding URL of https://www.example.com/$1, will redirect requests for the example.com root domain to the www.example.com subdomain, while preserving the URL directory.
The Always Use HTTPS action will only appear if your zone has an active Cloudflare SSL certificate.
Forcing HTTPS does not resolve issues with mixed content, as browsers check the protocol of included resources before making a request. You will need to use only relative links or HTTPS links on pages that you force to HTTPS. Cloudflare can automatically resolve some mixed-content links using our Automatic HTTPS Rewrites functionality.
Please note that it may take time for the changes to your DNS records to propagate. This may lead to temporary SSL or security errors during the process when changes are applied.
Important: the Cloudflare SSL service is provided as a third-party solution and is not managed by Yola. If you have difficulties adding the records to the domain, please contact your registrar for assistance.