Building sites that serve via secured connections is a good thing. Thanks to the smart engineers at Google, MODX Cloud enables SPDY on its servers. This makes secured sites serve even faster than unsecured ones. This can positively impact your site, beyond just raw performance:
- Google now factors in whether or not a site is served securely in their search ranking algorithms. SSL sites should do better in search.
- SPDY makes sites perform better. All things being equal, Google will also rank a site that loads faster higher than a slower one.
- Visitors tend to view more of your content the faster it’s served.
- Visitors trust sites more when “the padlock” is present. SSL isn’t just for e-commerce any more.
Testing Sites using SSL for Free
Everyone that has built a site that winds up being served securely has missed links to unsecured content. Browser warnings invariably ensue, making you look like an amateur. Building a site on an SSL server from the get go, can help you catch those things before the last minute.
Any new Clouds you create will just work—see the next paragraph. For existing Clouds, you need to regenerate the nginx web rules. An easy way to do that is by adding a comment on a new line, like “# update” (without the quotes) and saving.
Testing sites using https served with SPDY in MODX Cloud only requires you accessing the site from a secured link to the internal cloud URL (that starts with "cXXXX."). Add an "s" after "http" and the magic happens.
Using SSL in a Live Site
When you’re ready to launch your site with a https connection, you need to add an SSL certificate that supports your domain name. We're happy to help you configure that and have even more plans in store for that for the future. Until then you can learn more about serving sites securely with your custom domain in MODX Cloud.