R - Accessing SSL sites with httr

Question

I have looked around for a while trying to figure this out - I hope someone can assist. I am having trouble wrapping my tiny brain around combining the functions of httr and SSL content. Specifically, I am running in to trouble with what is likely a baisc understanding of httr. From what I have read, when using httr to GET sites that require SSL authentication, the certs must be saved somewhere where httr can grab to pass for authentication. The problem is, it does not seem to matter where I store a copy of my '.cer' & '.pfx', I continue to fail at grabbing the sites I (outside of R) have access to.

Is it possible for someone to lay down in ELI5 (aka laymans) on how one gets exports the correct certs (I used 'Manage Certs' from Windows & also used export from Firefox but both don't seem to help). Are there specific certs I should be grabbing? I have two: a personal key one and a ROOT.

After I grab them, are they supposed to be placed somewhere specific so that httr can retrieve them? When I attempt to define location: cafile="ca.cer"

I get the same errors.