Let’s Encrypt Is Now Out of Beta

Let’s Encrypt announced that the project is exiting beta this week. The initiative, which aims to encrypt 100% of the web by making trusted certificates available to everyone at no cost, launched its beta seven months ago.

Since our beta began in September 2015 we’ve issued more than 1.7 million certificates for more than 3.8 million websites. We’ve gained tremendous operational experience and confidence in our systems. The beta label is simply not necessary any more.

According to Let’s Encrypt sponsor Mozilla, more than 90% of the certificates are protecting websites that never had encryption before. Automattic is one of the early sponsors of the initiative and has partnered with Let’s Encrypt to add full SSL support for all sites hosted on WordPress.com. With the success of the beta period, Let’s Encrypt continues to renew and add sponsors to its roster, including Cisco, Akamai, Gemalto, HP Enterprise, Fastly, and other organizations.

“A mix of people and organizations use Let’s Encrypt,” Mozilla representatives told TechCrunch. “Many individuals and smaller entities use it, but quite a few larger organizations such as WordPress.com, OVH, Akamai and Dreamhost use it as well. It’s especially nice to see services like Dreamhost and Automattic opting to secure all their customers at once, which is something that Let’s Encrypt really enables.”

How to Set Up a Let’s Encrypt Certificate for Self-Hosted WordPress

If you want to install a free Let’s Encrypt certificate for your self-hosted WordPress site, WPBeginner has a tutorial with instructions for commonly used hosts, including SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost. It also includes tips on updating WordPress URLs after setting up SSL and updating Google Analytics.

If your host doesn’t have a fancy UI for setting up Let’s Encrypt, Brad Touesnard wrote a tutorial for manually requesting a certificate via Let’s Encrypt’s command line client and setting up automatic renewals. Touesnard also encouraged readers to support the development of the Let’s Encrypt Plugin for WordPress, a project that Zack Tollman and John Blackbourn are working on to make it a less painful process for users. We’ll be following the plugin’s progress as it develops.