How to Point your Website to HTTPS in WordPress | Not Secure Warning
If you are bothered by that little “Not Secure” warning symbol in your address bar whenever you or anyone else visits your site, first of all – Do not fret! You have visited the right place. We will see what’s that about in our How to Point your Website to HTTPS in WordPress Tutorial.
Here’s an example of the minor inconvenient warning that I was talking about:
Not Secure Warning
While this doesn’t affect your site much, it is one of those warnings that discourages visitors from continuing on your page. It might scare them away even though your website is not at all harmful.
The google “Not Secure” warning might still be the reason why your site visitor numbers could be dropping. It instils fear of personal data getting stolen, which is not a good thing, right?
Let us try to understand the what and the why of this warning and figure out how to tackle it.
The What – About HTTP and HTTPS
The symbol is basically telling you that your website uses the HTTP protocol. If you notice in the image above, the name of my website is being depicted as:
http://dumbitdude.com
As you can see, right before the colon sign I have “http” mentioned as the protocol that is being used to open my website.
The HTTP protocol is an older application layer protocol that is widely used all across the globe. Even though it is very popular, it is in the process of gradually being replaced by HTTPS which is an extension of HTTP and a more secure version since it is encrypted using Transport Layer Security or TLS.
HTTPS gives you authentication over the website, and ensures the integrity and privacy of the data is maintained. Phishing attacks can be avoided using HTTPS. This ensures that the communication between the server and client is seamless and without any intervention from hackers or tamperers.
You would want nobody to eavesdrop or mess with the communication that you are trying to have with a website. You would want your data to be secure, that’s where HTTPS becomes very important.
The Solution – Pointing Website to HTTPS on WordPress
If your website is on WordPress, we have an easy peasy solution lurking right in the Settings option provided in the dashboard. If you are using a different content management system, you can always browse through its Settings and look for a similar option.
I am going to use an example of one of my very own website to depict how the URLs can be updated to point to HTTPS.
The first step that you gotta do is make sure your site navigates to an HTTPS version of it.
So I tried opening https://straightfromamovie.com instead of http://straightfromamovie.com and it works. That means SSH has already been setup on it, and the site is ready for HTTPS.
So it’s a matter of simply redirecting your users to the HTTPS version i.e. a more secure version.
Steps to Point your Website to HTTPS on WordPress
In order to do that just follow the following simple steps:
Step 1: Go to your Dashboard i.e. your admin page. It might look something like this:
Step 2: On the left sidebar look for Settings. Then click on General.
Step 3: Next thing you know General Settings page opens. Look for the field that says WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL).
You will notice that both the URL fields have http mentioned in them.
Step 4: Update these fields with https version of your website. That is simply add ‘s’ in front of http for both the fields like this:
Step 5: Once done scroll down and find the Save Changes button. Click on it.
That’s it!
Now start using the HTTPS version of your website everywhere.
If you like this easy to understand How to Point your Website to HTTPS in WordPress tutorial, check out our other cool tutorials on our website too.
