Hey everyone! This is Scott from sertmedia.com. Today I'll be covering Really Simple SSL. Really.
Simple SSL is a great free plugin for setting up a simple redirect for your
WordPress website. I'm gonna go through each of its options. I'm gonna give you
my opinions and I'll even briefly touch on the additional options you may not be
aware of in the plugin. So you go ahead and you'll look for Really Simple SSL
in the wordpress.org repository. You'll click install now and you'll click
activate. So, one of the things that I love about this plugin is its
simplicity and it just works. There is a paid version, which we're gonna briefly
touch on, but what you do is if you go ahead and you'll click activate. What
this will do is it'll set a PHP redirect. So there starts being a PHP
direct or a wordpress redirect in a redirect through .htaccess file. What will
happen is, is if somebody visits your website, let's assume you don't have page
caching on it, and they try to access the HTTP version of the website. It'll
wait until PHP loads up and then it will handle the redirect with WordPress.
So the advantage of using an .htaccess rewrite is that it's
actually faster. So when you do, you'll go into the settings, SSL, and we're gonna
dismiss this notice for now just that way it's not bugging us, and then you're
going to be taking to the settings panel. So some of the options that you're left
with. It enables the mixed content fixer by default. What this does, is it
goes through and it tries to find assets that are being served as
HTTP and it tries to resolve them and it dynamically does the rewriting for it
via PHP. Which has a bit of overhead, so it is recommended to just simply do a
search and replace. But if you're looking for a quick solution, this is the best
option. Then there's the option to enable a 301 redirect via the WordPress
redirect which we just touched on. This just goes ahead and it handles a PHP
redirect to redirect the users to the SSL version of the website. You can
enable the 301 .htaccess redirect, which we will touch on
here just a moment, but I want to enable the JavaScript redirect method. So this
is a fallback method. It just adds a quick little line to your header, which
we'll look at right here. And let's see. Looks like it should have been added.
Here it is. If the document protocol is not HTTPS, then replace it with HTTPS.
So very simple JavaScript rewrite. If the website is, if every other redirect
method fails, this will make sure they get sent to the correct one. There's
an option to enable a debug tab to display general information. I'll show
you what this does. If you enable this, you'll get a debug menu right over here.
Which basically just spits out some nice information regarding the SSL setup and
the server information and then you send this off to the developer, when they're
trying to diagnose an issue. Then you have the option to disable .htaccess
editing, so what this will do is, it will prevent the plug-in from being able to
add .htaccess rules into your .htaccess file at all. So, if you have a client for
instance and you don't want them to enable this option because you feared
that they're going to break something or it will break something in your testing
then you'll want to enable this option. You also then have another option to use
the alternative method to fix the mixed content errors. This is just a fallback
method. If you noticed you have some kind of weird server setup and you notice the
mixed content fixer isn't working, then go ahead and try switching this option
on to see if it works and then the other option that I recommend is you dismiss
all the Really Simple SSL notices because I find them really annoying
personally. We're gonna turn this off and then we're gonna enable the
.htaccess 301 redirect. So the .htaccess 301 redirect is the
best option, but as it mentioned, if you enable it and you get locked out, you're
gonna need to have FTP or your file manager. Something that allows you to
regain access to your WordPress admin panel in the event of a fatal error and
this does happen quite frequently, depending on your server setup. If you're
using an SSL through CloudFlare, commonly what will happen is if your server
already has a sort of redirect going on, it may try to redirect it twice and
you'll get an infinite loop and you're just gonna be stuck in a really bad
situation. So I don't typically recommend using this, unless you're of a more
advanced user who can recover your site in the event of being locked out.
Otherwise when you do enable this option, you're gonna get the three green
checkmarks that says you were doing everything correct and then the premium
version comes with the ability to set HSTS rules, secure cookies, and then a
mixed content scan that will help detect errors or mixed content errors that are
appearing on the front-end. Overall, as far as plugins that go to handle redirects.
This is my absolute favorite. This does the SSL redirect quickly. It does it
effectively. It's very lightweight. It's well maintained. It's got three million
active installations. It's a great plugin. So if you had any questions about this
plugin in particular or if you noticed you may have had a strange error. Feel
free to ask in the comment section below In a later video, I will be covering how
to do a manual redirection, but for now this is a great plugin and if you're
using it there's no fault on your end. Otherwise thank you so much for watching
and goodbye.