One of the pesky things about having an author website is that you have to maintain the thing and keep it current. A couple of years ago, I wrenched mine out of the 1990s and into the ever-shifting “present” by abandoning the simple html pages that I mostly understood, and adopting a WordPress platform that I only kinda sorta understood. The thing is that the old version was not mobile friendly, which meant it was hard to read on a smartphone. The WordPress version is uber-friendly, and let’s face it, looks a lot better and is easier to read on anything except maybe an Atari or Apple II.
What I didn’t do, though, was make it a “secure” site, meaning among other things, having an “https” URL instead of “http” and having that “[padlock] Secure” thingy at the beginning of the address bar. I don’t do any commerce from my site, so I didn’t think it was necessary. But in this, as in so many other things, I was mistaken. Google really wants you to have a secure site, and you can take a hit in the search results by not having one. So… all right, all right, all right, I’ll do it already.
The process seemed pretty daunting at first, but it turned out I only had to make a couple of small changes in my WordPress dashboard, and another on my hosting server control panel, to make my pages appear as “https.” Getting the padlock, though—that was another matter. A tech support call to InMotion, my hosting company, netted the information that every image that appears on my website has to have an address that begins with src=”https instead of src=”http. That’s a lot of images! (A website called WhyNoPadlock.com was very helpful in diagnosing the issue, by the way.)
At first, I thought this meant I would have to upload all the images again and place each one back onto each page. Aaahh!!! But that turned out to be unnecessary. What I did have to do was edit each website page in code view and type in the “s” everywhere I found src=”http. That was it! Didn’t take more than five or six hours, tops. For some reason, it wasn’t needed on the blog posts.
In the course of doing this, I discovered that I had some pages way down on my menus that I’d never actually put the content into! Oops. (Workshops and TV Show, I’m lookin’ at you.) So I corrected that, too.
Bottom line: We’re done, we’re secure, we’re good to go! Condition Green throughout the ship!
