No SSL detected, but I’m sure I have SSL

No SSL was detected

If you see this message at the top of your page, this can mean two things:

  • You don’t have an SSL certificate. You can check this onĀ ssllabs.com/ssltest
  • The certificate check in Really Simple SSL failed, because the output on your server differs from the expected output.

If the scan on SSL Labs checks out, you can get Really Simple SSL to detect SSL simply by loading the admin over SSL:

  1. Go to the login page of your site on https, e.g.: https://domain.com/wp-login.php, and login
  2. Your site layout might break, but don’t worry. This is because the stylesheets are not SSL yet.
  3. Look for the button “Enable SSL” and click it (you might have to scroll down a bit if it’s broken).

That’s it! Your site will now be configured for SSL.

If the above does not work, an alternative method is to force the plugin to activate by adding

define(“RSSSL_FORCE_ACTIVATE”, true);

to your wp-config.php. Please note that if your site does not load properly over https because of server configuration issues, this might cause problems. Be careful with this option.

If SSL was detected, but you’re seeing this message after activation:Ā to change this page upload a new index.html to your private_html folderĀ or something similar, please check out the link for our article on this topic.

Edge case: test page couldn’t be opened and no server variables

There are some cases in which the test page could not be opened by the plugin, and when you check it manually: https://your-domain.com/wp-content/plugins/really-simple-ssl/ssl-test-page.php

It returns this:

#NO KNOWN SSL CONFIGURATION DETECTED#

(Make sure you have https in the URL!)

In these cases, even if you load your site over https, it still returns “no SSL detected”. In this case, you will have to “force” WordPress to know that it is now using SSL. You can do this by adding

$_SERVER[“https”] = “on”;

to your wp-config.php. Really Simple SSL normally does this for you, but if the test page couldn’t be opened it won’t do this automatically.

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