How To Force Your Site Visitors to Use Shared SSL Connection

From time to time, our technical support department is asked how to direct website visitors to view a website over HTTPS. Here is an example:

If a visitor goes to a website using http://mydomain.com. This is not secure so you can force them to always use the shared SSL certificate. Which is secure and encrypted so no one can see any data being transmitted except the party sending and the party receiving it.

Shared SSLs included on all our Shared Hosting plans as standard. If you are not familiar with SSL certificates, please view our article on it. If you have a dedicated SSL and want to make all of your website traffic use your dedicated SSL. We have a helpful tutorial on that on our knowledge base page.

Forcing your visitors to use the Shared SSL

 To force your visitors to use the shared SSL certificate that bodHOST provides:

1. Log into your cPanel
2. Go to the section called “Redirects”
3. Set the redirect “type” to “Permanent (301)”
4. Next, go to “http://(www.)” and choose the domain name you want to force SSL on
5. Enter your website URL using the Shared SSL option next to the “redirects to” field
6. We recommend that you select the “Redirect with or without WWW” option. So that any visitor forced to use the SSL connection whether they use mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com
7. Ensure the “Wild Card Redirect” option is checked
8. Click “Add”

During this example, we used the bodhost.com domain and redirected it to the secure108.bodhost.com/~bodhosti7 (please change this to your own website URL)