Well, it has been quite a journey of learning and it has been quite good. Green Geeks, a big American website hosting company upset myself and a few other customers about their unwillingness to support the latest and best free and open encryption service, Let’s Encrypt. They wanted to sell their SSL certificates instead. The mentality is quite different from this hosting company that we found called Siteground who looks at the big picture. Let me think for a second. I’m a customer. I want to choose my hosting company. One company says ‘come over here and we’ll let you do your own certificates or we’ll sell you one” or company B says ‘We will sell you one and it’s our way or the highway.” Which one will I choose? Green Geeks needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
Anyway, Green Geeks forced me to figure it out by myself but it’s working. I got SSL installed on all my domains at Green Geeks. You can read my tutorial about how to do that here.
HOW TO SET UP SSL ON CPANEL BY YOURSELF WHEN THE HOSTING COMPANY IS TOO SHORT-SIGHTED TO HELP YOU
Now that you have your SSL stuff installed you probably are like me and have a bunch of Word Press sites. What you will find is you will probably get warnings that look like triangles, exclamation marks, etc, etc.
First, your best resource that I found through this process is this website where you can type in your domain and it will spit back the cause of your no-padlock SSL certificate problem.
WEBSITE TO TEST FIGURE OUT WHY NO SSL PADLOCK
Next, you’ll probably find this blog very educational and might help you decide a course of action that is slightly different from my decision to ‘just fix it quick’. For me, my blogs weren’t highly important (like this one) so experimenting didn’t bother me.
GREAT WEBSITE TO LEARN ABOUT WHY MIXED SSL CONTENT WARNINGS COME AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM
Now, without further adieu, here is the ‘quick fix solution’ to the ‘no padlock error in a Word Press website. Just install this plugin and, if it doesn’t fix by default, change the setting to match mine in the screen shot below.
GREAT PLUG-IN TO FIX ALL YOUR MIXED CONTENT SECURITY WARNINGS
Bonus Feature! Force your Word Press Site to Use HTTPS
Now that you’ve gone to the trouble of making SSL work and then fixing all the errors, why not force all traffic to run via HTTPS so your site is hyper secure? It’s easy with this this plugin. Just… well. Plug it in. And done.
GREAT WORD PRESS PLUG-IN TO FORCE ALL TRAFFIC TO HTTPS
Hopefully everything here works smoothly for you as it did for me. You’ll note my success since I did this tutorial to this blog! 😉
