PrestaShop is one of the most popular open source platforms used by most small and medium enterprises which is loaded with excellent features including website builder, payment modules and store templates. It has more than 270,000 e-commerce vendors and is available in 60 different languages and offers customized solutions for selling your online products and manage your online business with greater efficiency. In this tutorial, we will show you about how to secure your PrestaShop platform with HTTPS protocol.
What Is PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is an open source platform which makes it highly secure, transparent and adaptable to customize your online store, drive your business and attract more customers.
Now if you have a website that is already running on PrestaShop, then you are on the right track as you have chosen a reliable and robust solution to meet your online business requirements. But if you want me make your online store compliant with e-commerce regulations and even more secure, then it’s recommended to use SSL certificate on your website.
Why Choosing SSL Certificate Is Important to Your Business?
SSL certificate is a software tool that ensures that your business is real and whether it is trustworthy while protecting your website against hackers from stealing vital information including usernames, passwords and credit card details. Essentially what an SSL certificate does is that it takes information provided by your users and encrypts it, which may be only understood by your web server. As the information transmitted on the web is through HTTP language, there is no data protection since the HTTP is not secure by itself.
The SSL certificate takes all the information, encrypts it and passes it on to the server in a secure environment on the hosted website or directly across to the payment processor. In turn, the SSL certificate gets the encrypted HTTP information and decodes it and performs the requested action. For ex: Logging in information, payment processing etc. When you think from where you should buy SSL certificate, there are multiple options as you can directly buy from certificate authorities or reputed resellers that offer same features but at cost-effective price.
Essential Steps to Follow to Move PrestaShop Site from HTTP To HTTPS:
Below steps are presented below to get idea of how to move insecure HTTP to secure HTTPS PrestaShop platform.
- PrestaShop has a built-in mechanism that offers SSL activation through its web interface. All you need to do is to log in to the PrestaShop admin dashboard and click on Preferences tab and then choose General option.
- Click on the ‘Please click here to use HTTPS protocol before enabling SSL’ which is located at the top of the General page right next to the Enable SSL option.
- This action needs to be taken to ensure that your SSL installation is working fine. If everything is done correctly, the Enable field provides YES and NO options to the user. In case there is something wrong with your SSL configuration, you will get a warning message.
- If everything is fine, you need to just select ‘Enable SSL on all pages’ to finish the HTTPS activation process. Make sure to save all the changes and choose Refresh and your entire website will be now served in HTTPS.
- On the downside, it may not be enough for moving your Presto site from HTTP to HTTPS as you might face errors such as 404, 500 or Not found messages. There are few errors that you can manage yourself and we have described few errors below for your consideration.
How to Create 301 Redirects?
By using this command, you can redirect users to SSL enabled connections by permanently changing the web address of the existing page of the old URL to the new URL. In PrestaShop, you might have to opt for paid redirect module from the Presto marketplace. The good news is that you can also create 301 redirects manually through the. htacces file. There are different server platforms which use different codes to achieve this and it’s best to get in touch with your hosting provider to know the right code.
Never Mix Secure and Insecure Content on A Webpage
Imagine even if one of the media files is served using HTTP, your browser is likely to show a warning message regarding insecure content. In such cases, its best to use relative links or modify your hyperlinks to HTTPS rather than HTTP. You must scan and check all your links and change them if required. It’s quite likely that your source code and plugins may still have the old http elements and hence its best to replace them as soon as possible.
HTTP To HTTPS:
- Make sure to add the HTTPS URLs and submit the XML sitemap across Google website tools. It’s highly recommended to use Robots.txt file to have control over the pages which will Google is likely to crawl and index.
- Track the changes that you’ve made and ensure that your Presto platform along with the website’s theme and modules are updated with the latest version to keep your online platform more safe and secure.
At Last:
Choosing PrestaShop for your website can be an excellent option as it provides you with greater security and reliability to meet your e-commerce needs and can be a wise business decision in the long term.
image credit: HTTP To HTTPS via BeeBright/shutterstock