I was wondering why I was getting certificate errors whenever I visited the root / naked domain (lcrosendo.info) of my website. I thought it was just par for the course when you’re doing an ALIAS in AWS Route 53 – because obviously wanting to force my website to resolve to www is more important than actually making it functional. It’s not that hard to just share www.lcrosendo.info and be done with it, but it just got annoying after a while like this isn’t how it’s supposed to be – which has happened a lot over the course of maintaining this blog on AWS from the ground up without any experience. I tried fiddling around Route 53, but I couldn’t get nothing to work until I realized it had less to do with Route 53 and more the certificate generated itself (should have been obvious).
This website is like a year old already, and I’ve since ported it over to LightSail. It’s been using the prepackaged Bitnami WordPress. I kind of just realized maybe the certificate wasn’t covering the naked domain (lcrosendo.info). I also discovered generating certificates in the PaaS was a super easy task. I just needed to use the Bitnami bncert tool (ref: Secure your WordPress site with HTTPS on Lightsail; How to setup FREE SSL certificate on your AWS Lightsail instance). I made sure to add the naked domain and the www subdomain. And after going through the quick process, I tested it in incognito and on my phone and I could finally link lcrosendo.info on social media and it’ll correctly resolve to the www subdomain.