How to Enable SSL on a Joomla 1.5 Website

In this article we are assuming that you have already purchased an SSL and you have installed it on your website, and all that is left for you to do is to enable it. If you need help purchasing and installing an SSL certificate on your Joomla website, then please contact us, we will definitely help you!

Listed below are the steps to enable SSL on your entire website, your administrator’s backend, and your VirtuMart shopping cart…

Enabling SSL on all of your Joomla website

The below steps will enable SSL for your entire website, so whenever someone clicks on a link it goes to https:// instead of http://

1. Login to your website as a Super Administrator
2. Mouse hover on “Site” on the top left
3. Click on “Global Configuration”
4. Click on “Server”
5. Change the drop down box next to the field “Force SSL” from “None” to “Entire Site”.
6. Click on “Save” on the top right

Enabling SSL for only your Administrator’s backend

When you enable SSL on your entire website, you will also enable it on your Administrator’s backend, but what if you only want to enable SSL on your administrator’s backend, leaving the rest of the website accessible through http://?

In order to do so, you have to do steps 1 to 4 above, and then choose “Administrator” from the drop down field next to “Force SSL”, and then click on “Save” on the top right.

Enabling SSL for VirtueMart

We believe that you don’t have to enable SSL for all of your website (unless your run an ultra-secure website – think about it this way, even Google does not use https:// for places that do not require you to login), just your administrator’s backend and your frontend shopping cart checkout page (if you have a shopping cart installed). Since VirtueMart is by far the most used shopping cart on Joomla, we decided to list the necessary steps on how to enable SSL for VirtueMart (if you’re using another shopping cart then we can also help you, just contact us!):

1. Login to your website as a Super Administrator
2. Mouse hover on “Components” on the top left
3. Click on “VirtueMart”
4. Click on “Configuration” in the middle of the screen
5. Click on “Main”
6. Choose “Yes” for “Force SSL on Checkout”
7. Click on “Save” on the top right

Some caveats

1. Make sure that your SSL is installed correctly if you’re having problems.
2. If you are sure that your SSL is correctly installed, and you are having errors such as “this page contains secure and non-secure items”, then it might be that you have absolute (hard-coded) http:// links in your content. You need to change those links to https://.
3. Again, if you’re still having problems, then it might be that your SSL certificate is installed for https://yourdomain.com and not https://www.yourdomain.com (or vice versa). If you need to use both then you need to buy and install a wildcard certificate. Otherwise you need to redirect the traffic (using .htaccess) from https://www.yourdomain.com to https://yourdomain.com (or vice versa).

Note that the above article was written for Joomla 1.5, but is easily applicable for Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7.