My SSL-encrypted website gives a warning stating that “there are both secure and non secure items”, how can I fix this?

Question:

I recently had you install a SSL certificate to my site. Now when I go to https://www.my_site.com/ I get a message stating there are both secure and non secure items and do I want to continue. If I click “yes” I lose the “lock” symbol. When I click “no” the lock remains. How do we get this message removed? Please advise.

Answer:

Check all your links on the page. What this means is that you have some links (probably to images) that link to your non-ssl page.

Usually you’ll find that you’ve linked to an image or page as :

http://your_site.com/directory/image.jpg

etc.

when all you really need is :

/directory/image.jpg

It is not illegal to specify the full URL, but when using SSL the browser will give that warning if you links/images/etc. that are linked in to your full site URL. As a side note, it is always better to link to items on your site as a reference to the root / directory and not the full URL. It makes the connection a bit quicker and it also makes it much easier if you ever need to move your site to a test domain for testing, etc (you won’t need to rewrite all the links!).

Another possible cause of the problem :

If you pull in images from a partner site, hit counter, etc. that is on a non-SSL site you will get this warning message too.

Basically, when a page is referred to via SSL the browser will demand that all the items inside the page are also SSL.

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