How to debug a blank settings page in Really Simple SSL

If you can’t view your settings in Really Simple SSL, but see a blank page instead, there are some common causes you can check.

Plugin conflict

One of the first things to check is whether the issue persists with Really Simple SSL (Pro) as the only activated plugin on your website. If this resolves the issue, one of the currently deactivated plugins was very likely related to the issue.

A quick way of doing this is by using the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin, which allows you to start a “Troubleshooting” session with certain plugins disabled and which is only visible to administrators of the site. Navigate to Plugins -> Installed Plugins and click “Troubleshoot” under Really Simple SSL (Pro) to enable a troubleshooting session with only the Really Simple SSL plugin enabled. You can end the troubleshooting session here as well, which will re-enable all of the plugins that had previously been disabled.

If the issue no longer occurs with Really Simple SSL as the only enabled plugin; start re-enabling plugins one by one, and check the Really Simple SSL Dashboard after each plugin that you re-enable, to see if this causes the issue to return. If the issue re-appears immediately after enabling a certain plugin, you’ll know that this plugin was almost certainly related to the behavior.

Permalinks

In some cases it helps to navigate to Settings -> Permalinks in WordPress, and clicking ‘Save‘ once while on this page (without making any changes to the Permalinks settings themselves). This will flush the Permalink structure.

Please also check if your URL’s, e.g. “yourdomain.com/about”, are working. If not, try renaming the .htaccess file, and re-save the permalinks again. This will re-create the .htaccess file, correctly written.

REST API disabled

If you go to yourdomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts you should see a list of posts, in raw json format. Compare with https://really-simple-ssl.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts.

If not, please check if you use a plugin which disabled the REST API.

WordPress installed in subdirectory

If you have a blank settings page, and WordPress configured in a subdirectory (e.g. website on domain.com, wordpress files in domain.com/wordpress), please log out, clear your browser cache, and log in again.

Content Security Policy

If you are a pro user, and have activated the Content Security Policy in a previous version, it sometimes happens that the policy is not fully upgraded during the update and is set too strict. If this is the case you should see something in the developers console on the SSL settings page like ‘ Refused to load * because it does not appear in the style-src directive of the Content Security Policy”.  In that case you can temporarily comment out the advanced-headers.php line in the wp-config.php. Then you should be able to visit the settings page. If you disable the Content Security Policy, then set it to learning mode first, it will add the necessary rules during learning mode.

Still not working?

Please contact us so we can figure out the problem. Please attach a screenshot of the console errors you see and the plugins you have active. This will also help others in the WordPress community!

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