Setup SSL/HTTPS with WordPress Plugin
Install and activate the Really Simple SSL plugin.
Visit Settings » SSL page. The plugin will automatically detect your SSL certificate, and it will set up your WordPress site to use HTTPs.
The plugin will take care of everything including mixed content errors. Here’s what it does:
- Check SSL certificate
- Set WordPress to use https in URLs
- Set up redirects from HTTP to HTTPs
- Look for URLs in your content still loading from insecure HTTP sources and attempt to fix them.
Note: The plugin attempts to fix mixed content errors by using output buffering technique. It can have a negative performance impact because it’s replacing content on the site as the page is being loaded. This impact is only seen on first-page load, and it should be minimal if you use a caching plugin.
Fixing Mixed Content in WP Database
Most of the incorrect URLs will be images, files, embeds, and other data in your WordPress database.
You can easily fix this by installing and activating the Better Search Replace plugin.
Go to Tools » Better Search Replace page. Under the ‘Search’ field, add your website URL with http. Then add your website URL with https in the ‘Replace’ field.
Below that, you will see all your WordPress database tables. Select all of them to run a thorough check.
Uncheck the ‘Run as dry run?’ option, and then click ‘Run Search/Replace’.
The plugin will now search your WordPress database for URLs starting with http and will replace them with secure https URLs. It may take a while depending on your WordPress database size.
Submit Your HTTPS Site to Google Search Console
Search engines like Google consider https and http as two different websites. This means you will need to let Google know that your website has moved to avoid any SEO issues.
To do that, you just need to go to your Google Search Console account and click the ‘Add a Property’ button.
This will bring up a popup where you add your website’s new https address.
Make sure that both the https and http versions are added in your Search Console.
This tells Google that you want the https version of your website to be treated as the primary version.