The reason why you don't see a green SSL lock next to your website URL
So everyone has upgraded to SSL and the WA world is a better place.
All fine and dandy. But it's not over yet. You still have to get it working properly for your site.
Couple of things you need to do . . .
First . . .
Look at your site in a browser and you're going to notice that you don't see a little green lock next to the word 'Secure' near your URL.
You're then going to think that something is wrong because in the WA management console it shows that the site has SSL. Yet your browser says it hasn't.
That's because you have links to 'http' sites on your webpage.
If Google sees one of these it won't show the secure green lock icon. It's called mixed content - a mix of secure and non-secure content on the page. You have to have it all secure to get the green lock to show.
So now you can go through all the links that you have on your site to other pages on your site and internal links to all images on your site and change all the links to 'https'.
If you have a big site that might take some time manually, there is a plugin you can use.
Try - https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/
I use it on my non WA hosted sites when I switched over to SSL and it automatically updates all the internal links to the 'https' equivalent. Which saved a lot of time on a 1,000 page site.
You'll also have to change all external links. Note that some won't have an 'https' version, so you'll have to decide where to still use them or not.
Once that's done . . .
Go to Google search console and add you site again using the 'https' version. Then upload the new sitemap.
No need to do anything for Google Analytics - that works the same.
But you'll have to do the same for Bing / Yandex etc
Recent Comments
29
Thanks a lot!! But how can I change the external links? What should I do with them? include https instead of http?
Worked immediately...Thanks!
NOTE: I also used a second plugin to fix the nonsecure content that was not fixed on the bigger sites I have. It is called appropriately enough "SSL Nonsecure Content Fixer"
Thank you Dave, is this plugin for external links as opposed to the one suggested by Ian? Not sure what it does.
I assume the plugin is deactivated after the job.
Hi, Jovo...
The second plugin takes care of the external links, etc. that the other plugin does not take care of, yes...I only had to install it on the bigger sites, the newer ones went totally green after the first plugin install and after activation, so no need at this point...
Both of these are intended to save you time to get to total SSL status and I would leave them both active - this way future links you may get will not affect your status...
We have some e-commerce sites that are not yet using SSL and the message that you get in the browser url window is an innocuous "i" icon - when you click on this, it says that any information submitted (i.e. email address or credit card information) is not secure...
This is alarming for a lot of people, they will be hesitant to purchase from your site, even if they are actually being referred likely to a secure site to pay i.e. PayPal...It is also just professional and the standard of now and the future I think....
Cheers!
Dave : )
Thanks, man. My problem was with my images. I had to go back to all my posts and edit most of them. Luckily it was a smaller site.
I have a couple other larger sites. So that plugin should be helpful.
Thanks!
Great info thanks for this. I was lucky that my site worked straight up with SSL from WA.
It didnt. Your site: https://advice-for-living.com/ site doesn't show the green lock. You need to change all the links to https
Now that is weird because I checked it when I did it and the green lock showed, drat now I have more work to do!
Still 17 links to change on the homepage -
view-source:https://advice-for-living.com/
If you're doing it manually then have to go through each page as the green lock shows on a page / post level. So you might see some pages show it, others don't.
Thanks, Ian, this is on my list for tomorrow. I will be sure to let you know when I am finished because it's always good to have a second pair of eyes, thanks.
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I have my site hosted elsewhere now, but still very helful regarding non-secure links. Thanks!