WordPress SSL Insecure Content Repair Service

You’re most likely to encounter the warning after migrating from HTTP to HTTPS and forgetting to remove all the HTTP links that may be present on the various pages of your WordPress website. Other common causes include plugins and images that are hosted on HTTP sites and linked to from your site with absolute rather than relative paths. External scripts on HTTP sites that you may be linking to using an absolute path will also cause the same problem. You can probably think of a few examples off the top of your head but unless you remove every single instance from your website, mixed content warnings will still be triggered when certain pages are loaded in clients’ browsers.

The mixed content examples above can be divided into two broad categories:

1. Passive – Any type of content that is unable to execute an action in users’ browsers is passive. Images are a good example of insecure content: they will trigger a warning but in and of themselves, they present no immediate danger.

2. Active – This type of insecure content is considered more dangerous as it has the ability to alter other parts of the pages on which it sits, and harvest user input in some cases. JavaScript, style sheets, IFrames and anything else a browser may download and execute are all included in this category.

Unfortunately, browser error messages do not specify whether the culprit is active or passive so any visitors to your website may well assume the worst, which brings us to the next point you need to consider.

There are a number of very good reasons you should act quickly to deal with mixed content errors caused by your website, including the following:

Your Visitors Are at Risk – The move to HTTPS was motivated by a desire to ensure that people are able to visit websites without having to worry about whether their safety will be compromised. HTTPS uses SSL encryption to protect the data that flows between your site and your visitors, in both directions. On the other hand, insecure content over HTTP, exposes your visitors to unacceptable risks such as the possibility of their personal data being stolen or used without their permission. You can imagine the effect that a successful attack on one of your customers would have on your business if it were found to have been launched from your own website.

Your Site Is at Risk – If your website is not secure, it could be altered by hackers, either with malicious intent or simply to inject links to sites they wish to promote. For obvious reasons, you will not want to be in a situation where your business website could be altered without you knowing anything about it, at any moment in time. With absolutely no control over the content that could be placed on your site in the event it is hacked, almost anything could happen.

Your Reputation Will Be at Risk – This is true of all corporate websites that trigger errors but none more so than e-commerce sites where products can be ordered and paid for. A mixed content warning that tells visitors their connection to your site is not fully secure is unlikely to inspire confidence in your business. If you’ve ever been browsing online and come across a mixed content warning yourself, you’ll know the kind of feeling they arouse and it’s not one you’ll be wanting to arouse in your own visitors

If you want to protect the reputation you have worked hard for and ensure that your customers are not exposed to any unnecessary safety risks when visiting your site, we recommend addressing the issue at the earliest possible opportunity.

Before you get started on fixing your mixed content problem, you will need to make sure that you have already installed a valid and up-to-date SSL certificate for your WordPress website and used a site-wide 301 redirect directive to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS. If you’re not sure how to complete these steps, please feel free to contact us and ask for assistance. In addition to our mixed content repair service, we also provide competitively priced maintenance services for WordPress websites.

Assuming that you’ve already installed your SSL certificate and redirected traffic to HTTPS, your next task will be to identify which particular resources on your website are loading via HTTP and causing the warnings. This may be a very simple task if your website consists of just a few pages but for large sites that are spread over hundreds or even thousands of pages, it can be quite a complex task. Fortunately, it’s not something you will have to do by yourself. There are Chrome tools you can launch to inspect specific pages that cause the warning and plugins that can automate this and most of the other tasks you will need to complete.

If you’re not keen on tackling the job yourself, either because you have too much on your plate already or because you’d rather leave to a professional, our mixed content repair service is perfect for you.

For website owners and webmasters who have a million and one other things to be getting on with, searching for and fixing mixed content issues can be an overly time-consuming task that just gets left on the back burner for months and months. This is perfectly understandable but, as we pointed out earlier, you’re risking your reputation, your turnover and your customers’ online safety every day that goes by without these issues being fixed. A much better approach to take is to let our experts take care of all the details for you.

Our WordPress content repair service covers everything that needs to be done to your site and once we’ve finished adjusting settings and making sure that there are no links to HTTP scripts, images, websites or plugins, your website will load without triggering any mixed content warnings and that’s a promise. The main tasks we will complete on your behalf are as follows: