3 Easy Ways to Force Your Wordpress Site to HTTPS

In today's tips and tricks we show you hot to force your Wordpress site to https using 3 different techniques

Website - http://bit.ly/2movgwN
Twitter - http://bit.ly/2nG01h1
Facebook - http://bit.ly/2mPVB2R
Instagram - http://bit.ly/2nvNSL6

Today on UV Design Tips and Tricks, we show you how to force your WordPress site to HTTPS. All right, so last week we showed you how to install an SSL certificate on Cpanel or your VPS Linux server. So today we're going to show you how to force WordPress to go through that SSL, let's call it, doorway, to make sure all your visitors are safe and secure when they visit your site.

WordPress, it's pretty easy. There's multiple ways to do things. And we're going to show you several different ways. The easiest way, well, they're all pretty easy, but for the [INAUDIBLE] people that have no idea when an htaccess file is or they don't want to dink around with too much, you can go here to plug-ins,add new. Looks like I have an update, we'll do that later. There are several different plug-ins that can do this. One that I'm familiar with and seems to work pretty flawlessly is Really Simple SSL. I tell people it looks like a two-year-old colored it or me, because I really am horrible at coloring. So go ahead and click Install Now. And then click Activate. And you get this message. It says, oh look, we found an SSL on the certificate for this domain. Do you want us to go ahead and force it to SSL? Yes, plug-in, please force me to SSL. Click it and then now, boom. Look, secure HTTPS. wwwfixitinpostfilms.com. Fantastic. So you can go here to, I have this up in another browser, so it's obviously, I went to this link before I installed that SSL plugin. And it's not, so then you can click any one of these links. You can magically watch it go to HTTPS now. So now everything on here is HTTPS. And that's it. Tutorial is over. Just kidding.

We obviously, if you're watching this, you want to find other ways besides just using a plug-in because less plug-ins on your WordPress site, the better. So I'm going to close that out, I'm gonna go back through here, deactivate. All right, after you deactivate your plug-in, you're back to square one. WordPress has no idea that you have an SSL servlet on your server. The other way, one of the other ways to do this is to modify your htaccess file. This is a file in your root directory of your site that you can open up and edit. This basically tells your web browser what to do when you go to the specific site. It's just basically three lines of code you're going to put in here. And you're going to start off with it being one, because you want this to be the first thing that a web browser does when it visits your site. This is telling it to when it goes to the site, to go through port 80 and that you need to go through the HTTPS doorway for this particular domain name.

It's going save that. And then you come back to your WordPress site and refresh. And then now it's through HTTPS. And again, all your links are through each HTTPS. Now one thing you might notice if you look up here is this has a little information bar. And then when you went to About, it had secure. What this means is that this page is fully secure. Every link, every image, well, there's no images on here, but everything on this page is in some sort of protocol for SSL or HTTPS. On our home site, there's not. And so an easy way for us to figure that out is by going to whynopadlock.com. And all you do is put in your domain name. And here, click check, give it a few moments. All right, so this says it found a valid certificate when it was issued, who was issued through, and the protocols it covers. And then here are the items that are not secure on my website.

Basically, it's all of the images. 'Cause basically WordPress is pulling images from the non-secure site, because that's when I first loaded this website. That's what I told it to do. So it has no idea. All we told it to do was to the main site. So to fix this, all you got to do is log back in. And once you're logged in, you'll go, you can, well, to check to see what I mean is you can go to your media, click on an image and then see how there's no HTTP there. Or I mean, I'm sorry, there is HTTP, but not

HTTPS. That's what the issue is. This image is not going through the secure portal. So a really easy way to fix that is either A, you can re-upload your images, because then they'll be secure. But who as time for that? Especially if you have hundreds of images and you probably don't even have the images still on your computer. So I have to go here to our lovely plug-ins. Again, there are several plug-ins that this will work for. I'm a fan of two of them, Velvet Blues and Better Search Replace. But we're just gonna go ahead and check it out with Velvet Blues. ........Watch for More