This clueless newbie made it work on Godaddy!

Don’t be scared off! This plugin didn’t do everything for me, but it did most of the work, and the rest was not hard to figure out. I used it to create a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, and then found a tutorial that, with some modification, allowed me to install the certificate on Godaddy.

I guess I’ll have to do this every 90 days, which might be a reason to switch after my paid-up year of hosting expires. Godaddy wanted $70 for a cerificate, so this is worth the hassle unless you’re very busy.

So here’s how to do it. Most of this is an adaptation of a tutorial for Linux users, but don’t worry, my adaptation works on Windows.

1. Use WP Encrypt to make your certificate (which for me worked simply and perfectly just following the plugin “help” – if it doesn’t work for you, sorry, I can’t help you).

2. Open cPanel twice in two separate browser tabs.

3. In the first cPanel tab, go to File manager, go to the directory /etc/letsencrypt/live/yoursite.com/ (replacing “yoursite.com” with your domain), and view the file fullchain.pem

4. Copy the top half of the file (only the first certificate). Select the first “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–”, all the mumbo jumbo that follows up to and including the first “—–END CERTIFICATE—–”, and nothing after that, right click and select copy. Then close the file.

5. In the second cPanel tab, look at the bottom in the Security section, click SSL/TLS. Under Certificates (CRT), click “Generate, view, upload, or delete SSL certificates.”

6. Go to the “Upload a New Certificate” section and paste your clipboard of text where it says, “Paste the certificate into the following text box:”

7. Type a description and click “Save Certificate.” This can be whatever, mine was “WP Encrypt ” followed by the date.

8. Still in the second cPanel tab, click “Go Back,” and then click “Return to SSL Manager” at the bottom of page.

9. Under “Install and Manage SSL for your site (HTTPS),” click “Manage SSL sites.”

10. Under “Install an SSL Website,” select your first domain. Click “Autofill by Domain” and the certificate should populate in the first box. (All 3 boxes may be automatically populated.)

11. If the “Private Key (KEY)” field is not filled in (mine wasn’t), go back to your first cPanel tab, open the file privkey.pem and copy the entire file. Then back in your second cPanel tab, paste the clipboard into the Private Key (KEY) text box.

12. If the “Certificate Authority Bundle” is not filled in (mine was), go back to your first cPanel tab, open the file fullchain.pem and this time copy the BOTTOM half of the file, beginning from and including the second “—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–” through to the end of the file. Then back in your second cPanel tab, paste the clipboard into the Certificate Authority Bundle: (CABUNDLE) text box.

13. Click “Install Certificate.” If it’s successful, you should get a response message like this:

SSL Host Successfully Installed
You have successfully configured SSL.
The SSL website is now active and accessible via HTTPS on this domain:
yoursite.com
…

14. Click OK and you’re done (unless you need to install the certificate for multiple sites or subdomains, in which case you’ll have to adapt the rest of the original tutorial yourself, starting from its step 13, here: https://isabelcastillo.com/lets-encrypt-ssl-certificate-godaddy-shared-cpanel)

Good luck and hope this helps somebody!