In order for your website to load up with the green padlock, you will need to ensure that the website loads up with ‘https://’ at the start of the URL in the address bar. You might have two domain names and want to redirect one to the other. When it comes to SSL certs and redirects, there are a couple of slightly different redirects you could set up. Let’s take two domains – ‘domain1.ie’ and ‘domain2.ie’.
- If you want to redirect ‘http://domain1.ie’ to ‘http://domain2.ie’, no SSL cert is needed
- If you want to redirect ‘http://domain1.ie’ to ‘https://domain2.ie’, one SSL cert is needed on ‘domain2.ie’
- If you want to redirect ‘https://domain1.ie’ to ‘https://domain2.ie’, two SSL certs are needed – one for ‘domain1.ie’ and another for ‘domain2.ie’
You might think why would you need an SSL cert on ‘domain1.ie’ when it is simply redirecting on to ‘domain2.ie’. The reason for this is that when you enter ‘https://domain1.ie’ into your browser, the SSL check on the server is done before the redirect takes place.
If you try to load up a website with ‘https://’ but you do not have an SSL cert installed for that domain specifically, you will get a ‘not secure’ or ‘unsafe to continue’ warning load instead. For more information on the different SSL certificate options please visit our website.