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I support http://lifering.org, a single site installation of WordPress 4.0.1. We recently decided it would be a good thing if we could force the entire site to https. (LifeRing is a drug-and-alcohol recovery group, so site discussions tend to be very personal.) We have an SSL certificate.

Our test site is at https:\lifering.org\sitetest.

The test site seems to be https. But on certain pages, if you press F12 in Chrome or use some other tool to look at the console, you'll see a scatter of error messages of the "this is loading as http and should be https" errors, mostly for images and xml files. Some of these files are in links I can't even find in the page code.

I particularly see the non-https errors on this page: https:\lifering.org\sitetest\chat-room.

We use this page for the local portal of our chat room, hosted by 123FlashChat. We've followed 123FlashChat's instructions on how to make it https, but we still see indicators that it isn't secure. How serious is it to have non-http links for something like GIFs and JPGs? I have no experience with this. And, how do I fix a link error that I can't even find on the page?

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As you have, use Firebug with Firefox, or use the developer tools in Chrome or Safari or IE to see what's loading on your site, the errors and work with the HTML.

The main non-https errors I see are for fonts from Google and gstatic.

So call your fonts in the @import style sheet or in functions.php by

//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=OpenSans

or the header.php by

<link href='//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=OpenSans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

and not in the form of

http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=OpenSans

because that will cause WordPress to add its own https when the first part of the href protocol is not included.

And, if you recently changed from http to https, you need to search all your post/page content to change all http links to https for images and internal links. Changing the site URLs to https is not enough, as that does not retroactively change all links in post/page content.

Use a plugin called Search RegEx to find/replace links in post/page content.

Or, use an SQL find/replace utility called interconnectit.com WordPress Serialized PHP Search Replace Tool to scan the whole database.

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  • Thanks very much for the suggestions. I actually used VelvetBlue UpdateURLs to update my links in posts and pages. I really think the things you list will finish it, except that I have to find another slideshow tool - the one I had was adding an http link to something called www.youradexchange.com - which I'm very sure we don't want. I deactivated the plugin and the link went away, but then of course I don't have the slide show.
    – hedera
    Commented Nov 27, 2014 at 2:41
  • VelvetBlue is good, but that won't change links in files like functions.php, etc; they are files and are not the database. And yes, a slideshow that pulls an ad like that is bad news.
    – markratledge
    Commented Nov 27, 2014 at 3:19
  • First of all why would you need Firebug to see these - they show up in the builtin Firefox console, if you have security warnings+errors checked before loading. Also, I'm curious why not every site uses // before the url? Are you sure // instead of http/https works on all browsers?
    – NoBugs
    Commented Apr 30, 2015 at 1:23

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