The short answer is a definitive Yes. While you can certainly pay companies for specific SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates, it is often not necessary to do so and very workable certificates can be obtained from other companies that route your access to your site, thereby using their certificates.
One such company is Cloudflare.
The reason I mention this as an alternative is that when you use Cloudflare, you are effectively pointing your domain to go through their DNS or Domain Name Servers. They are also what is known as a CDN or Content Delivery Network.
This way, a much greater degree of security is able to be implemented and they can provide this brilliant service on a free plan. Once your domain is pointed through their system, you need to then follow their systems to apply various settings that will then protect your site from attack to a degree, and also keep your site online even if you experience slowness from your hosting. This is done by the use of caching of your website on servers around the world.
A further benefit is that when your site visitor is typically a long away from your home hosting servers, it can take longer for your webs iet information pages to load and cause delays and a less than optimum user experience.
In this way, your site’s performance can be degraded.
However, by using Cloudflare CDN, the pages of your site are cached on Cloudflare’s servers and can be served up to you in a much speedier fashion.
When Cloudflare is used on their free plan, you will be issued with shared certificates for your site, which converts the HTTP to an https designation, which informs major search engines, your users and financial gateways (for e-commerce websites) that your site is using a safe transfer protocol.
This is very important for trust and security, both technically and for the piece of mind of your site users.
I will certainly not hang around an unsecured or not ‘ssl ed’ site when using my credit card, as an example.
As many people who create new websites use the WordPress platform, I can assure you that the Cloudflare system is very good at keepi9ng your site safe and working well, provided you regularly update plugins and themes as the CDN (Content Delivery Network) of Cloudflare is very good at routing traffic by the shortest distance to a cached version of your site and helping you to keep things running smoothly.
Cloudflare can be used with all the web hosting providers on this site as well.
