- Hey y'all, my name is Kori Ashton
and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday.
Today's tutorial is all about how to fix the little issue
of a broken SSL showing up on your WordPress website.
Especially if you know that you've installed that SSL.
And your hosting company has told you everything's good
to go, it's active and you're not seeing the padlock.
There might be a little issue that flags as not secure.
I'm gonna show you how to fix it all
in the budget of free, right now.
(upbeat music)
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Alright, let's get to the tutorial.
So if you've ever logged on to a website page,
on your WordPress website and you've seen this,
this little thing right here, this is not secure.
But if you go to any other page
on your WordPress website,
the little padlock is perfectly there.
But maybe your homepage or different page
is rendering as not secure.
That simply means there is something on this page
that is not pointed correctly.
Basically, it's not pointed to your SSL correctly
or to your server correctly.
So here's one of the ways to fix that.
I'm working in Chrome,
you can pretty much work in any browser,
if you can go and inspect this page, right?
What I want you to do is go to the console.
And I'm gonna zoom in a little bit here for you.
Let's move this over a little bit for you.
So you can kind of see this a little bit more clearly here.
So you can kind of see that we have a couple
of issues going on here, right?
We've got some red stuff happening here.
And this is kind of telling us
that it's failing to load a couple of images,
so we can troubleshoot that.
But the area that's actually telling us that
there's a security issue is actually up here,
inside of mixed content.
It shows that the URL path actually has http in it.
Do you see that right here?
It needs to have https inside of it.
So we wanna make a couple of quick changes
that allow Google to see this website as secure.
And your browsers to see this website as secure
and your visitors of your website to be certain
that this website is secure.
So we're gonna use a free tool,
called Better Search Replace.
This is a free WordPress plugin that's gonna allow us
to do a couple of search queries inside the database
and basically search the entire website
and point these URLs correctly with just a couple of clicks.
So let's head into your WordPress dashboard
and I'll show you how it's done.
So when you're inside your dashboard,
you can come over here
and go into plugins and say Add New.
And we're just gonna go and do a search
for that Better Search Replace plugin.
And this is the one you're looking for.
As of today, they have great reviews
and nearly one million active installs,
that's very impressive.
It hasn't been tested with my recent version of WordPress,
but I'm gonna trust this one.
And the other thing that's cool about it
is as soon as we're done,
we can always deactivate and uninstall it.
So let's install now and activate.
Now that that's here,
it's actually gonna live inside of your tools area.
So we'll go here to Better Search Replace.
So this is gonna allow us to type in the search term
that we wanna look for,
and that we wanna replace it with.
And of course, we can choose what tables
in the database it's gonna affect.
And then a couple other areas that we can try here,
this is a really cool, run as a dry run,
and then you press activate.
And it's gonna go do this for us.
Now, I'm gonna say really quickly, timeout you guys,
I'm just gonna say I want you to go,
be certain that you have a backup of your website,
today's version in place right now.
And you know how to get to that backup,
if you wanna revert this website.
We are about to tinker inside of your database.
So one little whoops here could break our site.
Ideally, you would have a backup of your live site,
or you would be running this over
in a staging environment and testing everything first there
to be certain that it's going to function properly.
But, they also have a safety net here
that might be able to help us.
Let me show you that, that's this little area again,
down here, run as a dry run.
So it's not gonna change anything in the database
if you leave this checked,
and it'll tell you what the results are
before you actually do an active run, right?
So, here's what we wanna do.
Remember back inside of our mixed content alert?
So here's what we're gonna do,
we're gonna look for http:
and we wanna replace it with https:.
So let's go start that one first, search for
and replace with https:.
Now, we need to check all the different tables
that you want to scroll through, scrub through,
search through, right?
So you can just click in here one time,
and do a Command + A or Control + A,
and that will select all of them.
If you are concerned that you don't want
to go through every single thing on your entire database,
then you can easily just select one or two,
or whatever you'd like to select, right, that's fine.
I'm gonna go ahead and for the sake of now
and select all and I'm gonna go ahead
and just do a dry run right now.
(processing sound)
So the dry run shows you up here
that 85 tables were searched,
4442 cells were found that needed to be updated.
But zero changes were made.
That's ginormous, that is a huge punch.
So again, I want you to be absolutely certain
that you have a backup of your website
running in place right now,
before you go ahead and do an active run.
I'm gonna go ahead and do an active run
because I know for a fact that I have a backup in place.
So I'm gonna uncheck this box and do a run.
(processing sound)
There you go, during the search and replace,
85 tables were searched
and there's the results and it updated 3690.
Okay, so let's just see if that was enough, right?
Let's go in, go back to the front side of our website,
we're gonna exit out here,
and I'm gonna do a hard refresh.
And there you go, there you go.
It's showing that we have a lock now.
So it's just simply that easy to do a quick final replace
to be certain that you have everything pointed correctly,
because a lot of times,
especially when you're dealing with an SSL,
it typically is that find and replace specifically
for the http needing to point to the https.
Kind of easy, right?
Sometimes you just don't know what to do though
when these situations happen.
So I hope this video helps you.
If you like this, please give it a thumbs up,
subscribe to my channel,
and check out over 400 different videos
I have here on my YouTube channel,
all inside the world of WordPress.
I hope this helps you.
I will catch y'all next WordPress Wednesday, bye everyone.
(upbeat music)
Oh my goodness, it's been a lot of work today.
Oh, somebody likes me, I got a text message.
Look at this, look how good my camera is, you guys.
Look how cool that is.
See if it zooms in by itself, automatic zoom.
We'll find it, we'll find it,
we'll find it, we'll find it.
My kids leave these everywhere.
Anyway, I'm a little addicted to playing with them.
Alright, stay safe
in all this craziness, you guys, bye y'all.