Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has announced its participation in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Let's Encrypt" project, which will enable the activation and provision of reliable and free HTTPS connections for those who maintain websites on WordPress.com.
This new partnership means that all Wordpress users who have custom domains (e.g. https://awesomedomain.com) will now receive a free SSL certificate, which will be issued by “Let's Encrypt” and will be automatically installed on their system, without any intervention required from them.
Previously, installing SSL certificates and supporting HTTPS was, in practice, more difficult and required website owners to contact Automattic staff after first obtaining a valid SSL certificate for the domain in question, a process that was also quite complicated.
The company has already started providing free SSL certificates since January, gradually expanding HTTPS support to more and more websites. For websites that do not have custom domains (e.g.: https://username.wordpress.com), Αυτοματτικ has long provided encryption support using certificates issued for its main domain, Wordpress.com.
Automattic's choice to gradually implement encryption certificates across all of its websites was rather expected, as the company is known to fight for online privacy, strongly supports the use of open source software, and is openly opposed to government surveillance.
[alert]Let's Encrypt is a service provided by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which includes Mozilla, the University of Michigan, the EFF, CoreOs, and others. According to statistics released by the EFF last month, Let's Encrypt has already issued more than one million SSL certificates so far.[/alert]
