@BastelPichi
@TinkerMan
Sorry this is becoming such a hassle. Thank you for hanging in there with me. I will get down
to the detailed nitty gritty now.
So, the very very first thing I when I realized that my free site was taking 15+ sec to load and then came with a "not secure" warning, I went into cPanel to see if there was a SSL feature. When I saw it there, I clicked on it and it took me to a page that had a button that would allow me to configure my SSL (see image) . So I clicked configure.
That took me to the following page (image below)
From here, I assumed that I should generate the key and CSR , which I did. Then, with key and CSR in hand, I posted the first question in this thread.
Then, when I went to SSLforFree (ZeroSSL) and setup an account and began that process, it asked me to validate by email, but I don't have the email address
[email protected]). So, I tried the other ways. The second way didn't work either. But finally after about 4 tries, the CNAME entries finally got the thumbs up. So, then I downloaded the zip file that included the ca_bundle.crt, private.key and certificate.crt .
So then I went back to the screen with the 3 fields (shown above) and entered the data from the private.key on top, the certificate.crt data in the bottom field and then the ca_bundle.crt data in the middle field. Then I pressed "Upload Certificate"...which made the data in the bottom 2 fields disappear but the private.key data remained. Assuming this was all part of the process, I then went back to my open screen at SSLforFree (ZeroSSL) to click on "validate your installation"...but it failed and said to try again in 5 min. Then I went back to the cPanel screen , filled in the 3 fields again and this time I pressed "Upload Key" button, thinking that SSLforFree (ZeroSSL) gave me a different key than the one that I auto-generated from before. When I did that, the same thing happened as before: the bottom two fields disappeared and the private key remained in the upper field. Then I went back to see if the installation could be validated again, but it wouldn't. Then, I tried one more time filling the 3 fields and pressing "Upload Certificate" and then checked the installation validator, but again it would not validate my installation.
I guess I've done this 3 times because ZeroSSL says that I've had 3 certificates issued....so now, unless I can get one of these to work, I'll need to get another free one from somewhere else.
Thanks again for your help. Let me know if there are any other screens that I should send to you.