14 DAY TRIAL // Automattic has announced a partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Let's Encrypt" project that will allow its technical staff to turn on and provide reliable and free HTTPS support for all of its customers that use custom domains for their WordPress.com blogs.
What this new partnership means is that users with custom domains (https://awesomedomain.com) will now receive a free SSL certificate on behalf of Automattic, and issued by Let's Encrypt, and have it automatically deployed on their server, with minimal effort.
Previously, installing SSL certificates and supporting HTTPS for these sites was harder, and required site owners to get in contact with Automattic staff, but not before obtaining an SSL certificate for their domain, which was already complicated enough.
The company was already supporting encryption for subdomains (e.g.: https://username.wordpress.com), using certificates issued for the main wordpress.com domain.
Automattic choosing to implement Let's Encrypt certificates is not a strange choice, since the company has been very supporting of open source software, Internet privacy, and had taken an anti-government surveillance stance before.
According to statistics released by the EFF last month, the Let's Encrypt project has already issued more than one million SSL certificates to website owners around the Internet. Also around the same time, EFF has hinted that the project may be rebranded under a new name in the upcoming future.