Since upgrading WP to version 5.7 you may start getting false critical alert message from WP site health as follows:
“Critical issue -There are problems with the HTTPS connection of your website”. Your WordPress Address is set up to use HTTPS, but your website appears to be unavailable when using an HTTPS connection. Talk to your web host about resolving this HTTPS issue for your website.
This has been reported as a false flag to the WordPress team (see https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/52783) – it is possible this issue will be addressed in the next WP minor update.
There are a number of different factors that may trigger this alert, as mentioned in the article, but can include:
- Plugins that move/hide wp-admin (they also strip out things to hide it’s WP being used)
- Plugins that hide all WP stuff on purpose for ‘security’
- Caching plugins/services
- Headless WordPress code
Most modern browsers warn you and some block you from accessing a site with an invavlid or missing SSL certificate and in the majority of valid reports, they’re being told already by the browser.
Therefore, if you are seeing this error, please do not contact us as your SSL is almost certainly working correctly – it is simply an over-aggressive check being made by WordPress which is having output stripped by (normally) plugins which cause that check not to validate, which causes the false-flag a site as having a critical error. It should be fixed in a forthcoming WP update.
However, if it is your BROWSER (Chrome/Firefox/Edge etc) that is reporting the message (rather than your WordPress dashboard health check), then contact us with details of the domain we are hosting and we’ll investigate.