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The SSL Padlock – How to find out why it went away

So you were building your website, you got your SSL certificate but boom! Your padlock is gone. It can be hard to find out why these things happen sometimes, but the good news is, its almost always fairly easy to fix.

The padlock denotes that your sites traffic is encrypted. It used to be important for anyone taking payments on their site, now it is essential for everyone. Many browsers will warn a potential visitor that the site they are visiting is “unsafe” if it does not have an SSL padlock in place, so you really should have yours.

Luckily, help is at hand! If you want to check to see why your site isn’t displaying the padlock, simply enter the web address of the page (or pages) you are concerned about into whynopadlock.com and review the report that comes from it. The most common reason for a missing padlock, especially with wordpress is a mixed content warning. This is where some of your content, perhaps images as an example are being served over http:// instead of https://. It is a simple matter of re-linking the images with the correct URL to make the magic padlock reappear. If you have a large number of mixed content warnings you may want to look at editing your database instead of doing it all manually! If you would like help with that, just get in touch!

Another common issue can be that your site is not forcing the redirect from http to https in your .htaccess file. Changes there are beyond the scope of this kb article but we will write one about it soon. In the meantime, get in touch if we can help.