SSL certificates encrypt your website, you can read about the process here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_certificate
If you host your website with us:
- Ensure that you have access to your DNS. If your website takes payments, you'll need access to your merchant account as well.
- Submit a ticket (https://www.tendenci.com/tickets/) with your domain name (ie: www.awesomestuff.com) letting us know you're interested in having an SSL certificate set up.
- Look for an email from us with the needed DNS records. You'll need to make those changes at your registrar (GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc). Once you make those changes, let us know so we can proceed with the setup.
- Once we've completed everything on our side, you'll need to update your merchant acount response receipts to use "https://" instead of "http://"
If you self host:
Our recommendation is LetsEncrypt. It's free, can be set up to auto-renew, and is a widely trusted certificate authority. You can read about the installation and setup here: https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/
You'll just need to ensure that the website URL in your site settings has "https://" prefacing it instead of just "http://" once you've gotten the site responding using SSL.