HowTo: HTTPS on IIS website with free auto-renewing certificate

Below is an image-based walk-through on how to configure HTTPS on an IIS website, making use of a free certificate for encryption from the non-profit Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, also configuring autorenewal of the certificate.

1) Download the win-acme client application (for the command-line).

There’s also a GUI app called IIS Crypto if you prefer. However, this article uses win-acme tool.

2) Run wacs.exe from the folder where win-acme tool is unpacked.

3) Follow same steps as below selecting your own site and binding.

Just press Q when finished and you’re done. No need to worry about next renewal (mentioned on the screen), will be done automatically.

HowTo: Optimize your website enabling web server GZIP compression

Was recently checking out the fine tools from GTmetrix for optimizing some websites I manage and one of the issues I noticed on a client’s site was that GZIP compression was turned off.

They have a GZIP compression setup article for IIS and Apache web servers that contains a sample for Apache with compression rules for various mime types and exceptions for older Mozilla 4-era and MSIE browsers that may have issues with it.

There is also GZIP compression at NGINX

A simple tool to check a remote URL just for GZIP compression is at https://varvy.com/tools/gzip/ and at their read more page they list alternative ways to set up GZIP compression for Apache web servers (they do list fewer MIME type there, so do checkout the sample from GTmetrix too and combine) and an example for NGINX that also defines some extra rules for IE6 and exclusion for IE<6.