In the wake of the Heartbleed bug, I've decided to put forth the effort to get an SSL certificate for my website. After carefully checking to make sure my server was updated to a newer version of OpenSSL I started searching for free or low cost certificates. I found free class 1 certificates at www.startssl.com. After validating my email and again validating my domain email I was able to set up a private key and generate a certificate. Then installing the certificate into Nginx was as easy as following the directions at startssl.
Now my website is available from frank-holton.com as well as the non https address.
On a related note the performance of the django-cms pages has improved greatly as a result of the tuning, however, I am still seeing page load time spikes roughly every half an hour with larger spikes every three hours. I'm guessing its likely related to the load on the VPS this website is being hosted on. The blog site is still quite slow with 6 second page load times occasionally. I'm still working on optimizing the blog and it currently doesn't do any caching.