how to get the https padlock icon for WordPress websites

Your trying to get your WordPress site secure. You’ve done the basics, like get a certificate, and enable https on your web server.

But the darn lock icon just won’t come up. It looks something like this

Then , what’s worse, some browser work with the lock icon, some don’t, some won’t even display the page.

The main problem is called ‘mixed content’ – which means some of your content is still loading over http:// instead of https://. It could be an image, or javascript, or css.

Here are some things to help you:

• log into /wp-admin/ and then settings/general, and change both the ‘WordPress address’ and ‘Site address’ to https://www.yourdomain.com.au
• make sure you have a favicon.ico   – this can stop the https lock icon from appearing
• refresh plugin settings for anything that has external forms, like active campaign
• use https://www.whynopadlock.com  to see why the padlock isn’t appearing
• use firebug or ‘developer tools’ in your browser to see blocked content
• hope and pray that your plugins and themes didn’t hard code http:// into URLs, you’ll need to track them down and fix them. If you have hard coded URLs – use /wp-content/xxx/yyy  instead of http://www.yourdomain.coma.u/wp-content/xxx/yyy .

By Scott Farrell on April 18th, 2016 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress