If you haven’t moved to running your website over a secure connection with an SSL certificate yet now is well past time. Without this your visitors will get errors, search engines will rank your site lower and the security of your information might be at risk.
A ‘your connection is not secure’ error can mean a number of things…
1. You don’t have an SSL certificate
For the reasons mentioned above, you need to get one 🙂
What to do
Talk to your web host and get a certificate set up on your web hosting account.
If you have a certificate and everything was running fine but has all of a sudden changed it could mean one of a few things.
2. Your SSL certificate has expired
A sudden error might mean your certificate has expired. You can check the details of your certificate by clicking on the padlock in your address bar and looking at the certificate details (the process is different for different browsers but it’s pretty easy to get there).
What to do
Your web hosting provider shouldn’t allow this to happen so talk to them.
3. You’re trying to access the website via http rather than https
Make sure your address bar shows https://, not just http:// without the s. If you need to manually type the s into the address bar and see if things work ok. You may need to
If you’ve followed a link from another site and ended up at http:// without the s you can try and enter the correct url into your address bar manually.
- If that works but when you click something in your menu or follow a link on your site to another page you end up back at
http://you need some configuration work done in your website and probably an upgrade to your database. (You might also want to get a redirect put into place to automatically flick visitors across the correct url). - If that brings up an error or warning go back to steps 1 or 2.
What to do
Talk to your web developer. They should be able to make the necessary upgrades and set up redirects.
4. Bonus error! Mixed content
If you get a ‘Your connection is not fully secure’ or ‘parts of this site are not secure’ warning it means your SSL is setup correctly but there are bugs in the code which are trying to load things from insecure sources into your site – these are often images or bits and pieces from other places like fonts or scripts. You need an expert to troubleshoot these.
What to do
Talk to your web developer. They should be able to track down and fix the problem.