SSL, the padlock, and Firefox

JenniferEklund

New Member
I just wanted to post this because hopefully it will save somebody else the hours I just spent today trying to fix things with my site/SSL/and Firefox.

After buying an SSL cert from GoDaddy and having the support team here install it yesterday, I had a bunch of problems getting the padlock to display on the interior pages of my site in Firefox even though in Chrome the padlock was always displayed. Same issue in Internet Explorer where that annoying bar would pop up saying "only displaying secure content" and then when you'd tell it to show everything the page still looked the same! :eek: We also couldn't get a redirect from within cPanel to function because of some "mystery" interference from my site. After reading all over the net about people with similar problems I found what seemed to fix everything.

Since I know many of you are running eCommerce sites with Wordpress I'm sure this may come up for some of you and it's extremely frustrating after purchasing a security certificate to not have it work!

I was searching all over my pages for "mixed content" (links to unencrypted images/scripts being sent out, etc.) which Firefox really frowns upon. Your padlock gets yanked on any page displaying "mixed content." Two things had to be taken off my pages:

#1 -- AWeber mailing list plugin/widget that was sending a Javascript out to a non-https:// link

#2 -- This one was a bigger deal: Jetpack -- a really popular plugin with WP used for tracking statistics and all sorts of other add-ons. As soon as I deactivated Jetpack my padlock reappeared almost everywhere.

#3 -- I also had to go in and make sure all the links in my "Subscribe" box pointing toward Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn etc were pointing to https:// links.

I used a site called: whynopadlock.com and all my pages tested clean, but they weren't! If you use the Web Console in Firefox you can go into your page and look for links to things that are not "https://" that will cause your padlock in Firefox to go bye-bye.

I hope this helps someone down the line!

Jennifer
 
In near future Mozilla is going to launch Firefox version 23 and that will block mixed SSL content. Use of mixed SSL content while developing website can arise an issue of browser warning on padlock. Proper use of CDN and developing a website using "relative path" instead of "absolute path" may reduce future browser warning.
 
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