How We Fixed The Issues We Encountered After Enabling SSL on WP Tavern

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Do you notice anything different about the Tavern’s URL? We recently enabled SSL on the site. Although the transition from HTTP to HTTPS was relatively smooth, we encountered a few issues.

Postmatic Thought The Tavern Disappeared

Soon after making the switch, we received error notices from Postmatic when trying to moderate comments via email. Because our URL changed, Postmatic couldn’t communicate with the Tavern as it thought the site was offline. After contacting Postmatic and having them change our URL in their system, the plugin is functioning properly again. If you use Postmatic, please read this support document before making the switch to HTTPS.

WordPress for iOS Fails to Sync

Trying to access published blog posts on the WordPress for iOS mobile app produced the following error.

Jetpack SSL Sync Error
Jetpack SSL Sync Error

I contacted Jeremy Herve, Jetpack Mechanic at Automattic, who pointed me to the following Jetpack troubleshooting document, specifically point number five. Adding the Jetpack signature code to the WP-Config file fixed the content synchronizing problem.

Do you use an SSL certificate on your site? Try adding the following to your site’s wp-config.php file:

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define( 'JETPACK_SIGNATURE__HTTPS_PORT', 80 );

This works on hosts that have SSL terminate on a reverse proxy and the server itself is still listening on port 80 or something similar.

Google Hangout Embed URLs Don’t Work in Text Widgets

I discovered that the URL’s provided by Google Hangouts to embed live video into a text widget no longer work. While troubleshooting, I noticed that the video embed displays correctly if I change the URL to HTTPS from HTTP. This requires more investigation as I’m not sure if it’s a mixed content issue or a bug in WordPress.

Google Hangout Embed Video Disappears Using HTTP
Google Hangout Embed Video Disappears Using HTTP

Considering so many WordPress site owners are enabling SSL to encrypt communications and to receive a minor boost from Google in search engine rankings, the issues described above are worth keeping in mind before making the switch. If you encounter any problems with the Tavern you think are related to our use of SSL, please report them using our contact form. If you recently enabled SSL on your sites, tell us about your experience in the comments.

Would you like to write for WP Tavern? We are always accepting guest posts from the community and are looking for new contributors. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your ideas.

12 Comments


  1. It’s great to see more and more sites moving to SSL but, it’s true, it can cause connection issues to services which are expecting to connect to you over a non-ssl connection. The same is true if you were to change your url.

    We’ve had a large number of sites in our network switching to SSL in recent weeks so I went ahead and put up a support document on our site to help with the transition.

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    1. Ahh cool, thanks for the link. I’ll add it to the post.

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  3. You might want to check the bit about new articles not appearing in WordPress News in the WP Admin. :(

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  4. When turning on SSL on our site I had to revise some custom links in the menus and some URLs in the widgets to ensure paths were set to https.

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  5. How did you address mixed content for embedded URL paths on old posts?

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    1. Hmm, I haven’t checked any of our previous posts with embedded content in it. Thanks for the heads up. Gonna go check out a few posts now.

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      1. I found the Search Regex plugin really helpful for updating old embeds when I moved my blog to HTTPS a while back.

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  6. @Jeff

    New Tavern posts are not appearing in the WP Admin.

    Is this a known issue?

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    1. Thanks for the report. I confirmed the issue and reported it to our tech team. Apparently, the feed URL got disconnected to the Planet which may or may not have something to do with the switch to SSL. It should be hooked back up to the correct feed url soon.

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      1. Don’t know if it’s just me but it’s still not updating. :(

        …or we have a different definition of “soon”. :)

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  7. The issue in Jetpack with sites that terminate SSL on the edge requiring that constant is being worked on with a patch in testing stage too. Hopefully won’t be a problem in the relatively near future.

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