Relaunch “Site Not Secure” problems – ssl

So, some of the summer vacation went on relaunching my blog – not quite rocket science but still it is not something I do every day, so I had to do a bit of dusting to get up to speed.

By today your blog need to be SSL/HTTPS, I must admit that I dont quite get why – I could understand it if you were hosting sensitive stuff or allowing people to post sensitive data like creditcard info etc, but for a general technical blog?? But who am I to teach google what to do 😉 So obviously I had to upgrade to HTTPS as well, fortunately these days most providers offer LetsEncrypt certificates so I thought I was in for a breeze…

After enabling a certificate for my site, I browsed to the site just to see:

Your connection to this site is not fully secure

wtf :-O

ok well, a bit of googeling turned up a few SSL checker sites;

https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html?hostname=readmydamnblog.com

This first link will check the certificate, so it is only checking that the certificate itself is valid for your site/url – but still a good place to begin..

Well that part turned out ok.. so nothing wrong with the SSL cert.

The next step, there might be links to your own site on your site that use HTTP and NOT HTTPS, this is bad and will cause the page to fail HTTPS checks in Google Chrome and other browsers..

I found mention of a tool to traverse your site for just such links and tell you which pages on your site have problems.

https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/

Meanwhile though I ended up doing something very simple, I right clicked on my site in google chrome and chose “view page source”

then I searched for “HTTP:” and sure enough the logo on my wordpress blog had a direct link to the logo starting with HTTP: – after fixing that everything is now A-OK.. So my suggestion to you if you run into this problem, inspect the page source looking for HTTP: – this should help you hunt down problem links..

As an ironic twist it turned out that I have a lot of HTTP links, so looks like I will need to do some cleanup of the database to get rid of all those legacy links.. Aint IT grand 😉