Test HTTPS in your Test Environment

Most public websites today support the HTTPS protocol to communicate securely with their web users.  Such websites have an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate installed on their production web server.  If you are building a website that would implement the HTTPS protocol, then it would make sense to implement HTTPS in your Development environment and your Test environment as well as your Production environment. 
In your Dev and Test environments, you can use a mock (self-signed) SSL certificate.  But for your Production environment, you will need an SSL certificate from a Certification Authority like VeriSign or GoDaddy.
To implement HTTPS in your Dev or Test environment, you can perform the following steps.

1)     In IIS Manager, at the server level, in the Features View, select the Server Certificates feature.

                                              

2)     In the Actions pane, double-click Create Self-Signed Certificate

3)     Enter a name like MyWebDevCertForIIS or MyWebTestCertForIIS

 

4)     Back in the Connections pane, select your website, and in the Actions pane, under Edit Site, double-click Bindings

5)     Click Add to add a Binding

 

6)     In the Add Site Binding dialog, select https type, port 443 and the appropriate SSL Certificate (i.e. MyWebDevCertForIIS)

7)     The web application now has the correct protocol bindings