How to Fix SSL Not Fully Secure WordPress Website

thank you so much for watching the press Avenue YouTube channel my name is John and we talk about WordPress tutorials to help you with your WordPress website alright so today we're gonna be talking about how to fix a website that's not fully secure what I mean by that is you have an SSL certificate installed yet you're still getting a panel lock that shows us not secure now you may not have an e-commerce website but having a secure site is required by Google otherwise they dig you on SEO rankings and also it is a really good way to put off your users so maybe I go to your website and I see that it's not secure it just makes people uneasy because they don't really understand why their browser is telling them that and it may just be that your logo is just an HTTP instead of an HTTPS and it really doesn't change the functionality of a site but it does make people uneasy when they see that and also it ruins your rankings which is why we're all here in the first place all right so let's get to it if you haven't subscribed go ahead and hit that red subscribe button after you do so a little bell shows up and if you click that it'll notify you of new WordPress tutorials just like this alright moving on our website press on video comm has a list of all of the tutorials we've made so if you have any questions you can go here search the tutorials and find exactly what you'd like and then the last thing I'll say is we have a Facebook group which is facebook.com slash group slash press Avenue the reason I'm bringing this up is a ton of people have questions afterwards and it's easier to follow up on here share links and do whatever more from that so if I don't have a tutorial on something there's no where to ask on YouTube you'd simply come here and ask and the number one requested tutorial is securing WordPress so here we are alright so we have a website here and this has an SSL certificate installed and how we know is there is a checker online called the SSL checker which I'll show you so to check if you have it installed correctly this could either be through your hosts or you did it yourself I would go to a site called SSL Shopper calm click there checker punch in your website and hit go and it tells you if this certificate is installed so that's step one of all of this so you can't fix non secure issues if um you don't have it installed so if I look here all the green checkmarks are basically saying hey John everything is installed correctly so we kind of past that step so just because you have an SSL installed which I'm showing you here doesn't mean that Chrome or Firefox or Internet Explorer or anything that's being used is going to show it as fully secured unless all the steps are completed so this says this is a carpentry website it says all this is secure and we're good to go but when I go to the site itself Chrome is saying and it's really small I can this I I click it your connection to this site is not fully secure and then it says something scary like attackers might be able to see the images you're looking at on the site and trick you by modifying them so that freaks people out especially if they're going to be giving you a credit card or money online if they see this kind of warning people usually steer clear of your site or entering money which can be a problem so if I click around on this particular site that doesn't change you can still see that that I is in place as not secure but we're gonna fix that so the SSL checker has told us hey the SSL certificate is there now we're going to use another checker called get bit JIT bi t.com slash SSL check and I'll leave this in the description so I like this one because it tells me every single page that has non secure content so it's checking it says it's crawled nine pages so far and then saying at the home page the about page services reviews portfolio contact free estimates which on this site is every page now I have another checker that I'll show you in a moment but the reason I do this one first is it pulls every single page so if I have a hundred pages I can start to see like hey if the footer has non-secure content I can just fix that and it fixes all 100 pages so that's why I use this one first the second one I use is why no paddle accom this one tells me exactly which elements are non-secure so they have HTTP instead of HTTP so I come down here I'll paste I'll tell them I'm not a robot thinks about it for a minute and I'll hit test page well wait so I'll let this process and then it gives a link to the full test so you can send it to your client or whoever asked you to test it so it has a results URL so it's saying I'm using let's encrypt which is fantastic and then it says mixed content error so big reason people have errors is this mixed content error what that means is we have HTTP and HTTPS on the same exact page and it's showing mixed content which is an error which shows that non secure warning so it's saying we have an insecure URL and it's actually the logo on line 128 well in WordPress I don't go through and do it line by line I do it within the CMS so we'll come back to our site and we essentially need to fix this here now if you don't want to use a checker or sometimes you get results where the checker says hey I can't actually give you results for whatever reason or maybe it's a local site or just it's a non-public you can right click in chrome and go to view page source and other browsers you can go up to view and go to view the source so here I am in the source and I know a lot of people don't like the code they feel like they might go blind looking at this but what you want to do is hit ctrl F on Windows or command F on the Mac and I'm going to search for HTTP colon so HTTP is that non secure link and I can just scroll through here so there's a Twitter image there's [Music] a remodel picture for this particular one when I scroll down on the right you can see where the highlights are here is that logo again and then I think that's it on the search so that's easy so there's three things so fixing the logo on a page I could go into the page I can update it update it to HTTPS save it publish done but I want to change it across the entire site without having to nitpick and dig through every page and that's where a plug-in comes in so there are two plugins I recommend one is really simple SSL this is a great way to [Music] see if you have an SSL certificate and then enables SSL in one-click by fixing all these things so it says what does it actually do it does all this it doesn't quite fix everything it gets like 80 90 percent of everything but it does fix a lot of things the twenty ten to twenty percent it doesn't fix they have a pro version for money but I don't think you need it better search for a place now this one is for searching for something and replacing it it's not necessarily for securing your site but it is the best tool for that so it's a tool for searching and replacing so what we want to do is search for non secure items and secure them so we're going to add this to the site so we'll go back here we'll go to the dashboard we'll give it a minute to load I'll go to plugins and then better search for place I've already added it but you go to add new search for better search for place you'll find it it's by a company called delicious brains they're fantastic and they always update their stuff next we'll go to tools and then better search replace on the left hand side and a neighbor pro version where you can back up your database files and stuff like that before you do anything which is great but I'm in a search for I'll just copy the website here so if you look on the back end everything is secure so I'm getting the lock but on the front end I'm not so I'm going to search for HTTP slash slash your domain name com with the backslash and I'm going to replace it with HTTPS dot slash slash your domain comm if that makes sense so make sure these match exactly except the first ones HTTP and the second ones HTTPS then ctrl a our command a on the Mac to select every database table and then leave this checked and hit run what this does is it does a dry run and it does no changes to your database so of course you want to make sure you're backed up I back to sign up this morning so I don't need to worry about it and then it's gonna run through a dry run of everything that may need to be changed what this does is now I don't have to go through and change every detail so now it's saying of the 33 tables 14 cells had this insecure not insecure sorry non secure link and no changes were made so I want to update these 14 so I can get that security in place and fix that error so 14 cells fine with me run so now it's actually going in and changing this HTTP to HTTPS making it secure throughout the site in 14 different places so now it reloads and it says 14 cells were changed and there were 14 updates now if you have any caching right now you dump all your cache and you go back to the front end of your site all right so I paused it dumped the cache on the host came back and then refreshed and now we're showing the lock and when I click it it says connection is secure so now no matter what browser it is it's showing the green lock the white lock and it's showing that secure which makes users feel a little better about your site helps you rank on Google and the changes are fixed across the board so now when I go to services we solve the lock so every page of the site is now fixed just with that URL change which is incredible now I will say as a shameless plug if you need help installing an SSL certificate on your site we've created a course which features the top 10 hosts and has additional fixes like this used to be a hundred bucks so we dropped it down to twenty just so we can get more people into it and teach more people how to secure their stuff because this is really important and we love to help so we'll have a link in the bottom below if you join the Facebook group and ask me for a coupon of course I'll give you one $19.99 is pretty easy to get into but we do cover or I cover SiteGround WP engine Bluehost Hostgator cPanel GoDaddy and CloudFlare which is huge with CloudFlare it doesn't matter who you host with if you change your name servers to them and then point them back to your host you can have an SSL certificate for free even on sites like GoDaddy which don't play nicely with the free stuff because they want you to pay anyway if this was helpful in any kind of way go ahead and give it a thumbs up additionally if you have any questions or if this helped in any way let me know in the comments I love your feedback I love to reply and this community has been really great thank you so much for watching the press Avenue WordPress tutorials YouTube channel my name is John and thanks again