The browser padlock and why it might not appear

It's important to have an SSL certificate these days if your site is to have any credibility.

Even if you do have a valid certificate in place, you may still find that a browser refuses to display the padlock. Different browsers have their own criteria and display the information in different ways, but we've generally moved from 'a padlock when the site is secure' to a clear 'site insecure' warning.

The image above illustrates this. The site does have a valid certificate in place.  My two favourite browsers do both have developer tools which allow you to drill down and find the reason(s) for the warnings.

That's good for a single page that you know has a problem. But if you're a Scrutiny user, you want to be notified of any such problems on any page of your site.

Scrutiny has long had features to help you with migration to https://. It alerts you to old links to your http:// pages and pages which have mixed content. (images or linked files which are http://)

As mentioned above, browsers vary in their criteria for displaying the padlock. As from v9.8.0, Scrutiny makes additional checks / warnings:

The insecure content alert/report will now include:

• insecure urls found in certain meta tags, such as open graph or Twitter cards.
• insecure images, whether hosted internally or externally
• insecure form action urls, even if the 'check form action' is switched off.

Migrating to a secure (https://) website using Scrutiny 9

There is a more recent and updated version of this article here.

Yesterday I moved another website to https:// and thought I'd take the opportunity to make an updated version of this article. Scrutiny 9 has just been launched.

Google have long been pushing the move to https. Browsers now display an "insecure" message if your site isn't https://

Once the certificate is installed (which I won't go into) then you must weed out links to your http:// pages and pages that have 'mixed' or 'insecure' content, ie references to images, css, js and other files which are http://.

Scrutiny makes it easy to find these.

1. Find links to http pages and pages with insecure content.

First you have to make sure that you're giving your https:// address as your starting url, and make sure that these two boxes are ticked in your settings,

and these boxes ticked in your Preferences,

After running a scan, Scrutiny will offer to show you these issues. If you started at an https:// url, and you had the above boxes checked, then you'll automatically see this box (if there are any issues).

You'll have to fix-and-rescan until there's nothing reported. (When you make certain fixes, that may reveal new pages to Scrutiny for testing).

2. Fix broken links and images

Once those are fixed, there may be some broken links and broken images to fix too (I was copying stuff onto a new server and chose to only copy what was needed. There are inevitably things that you miss...) Scrutiny will report these and make them easy to find.

3. Submit to Google.

Scrutiny can also generate the xml sitemap for you, listing your new pages (and images and pdf files too if you want).

Apparently Google treats the https:// version of your site as a separate 'property' in its Search Console (was Google Webmaster Tools). So you'll have to add the https:// site as a new property and upload the new sitemap.

[update 15 Jul] I uploaded my sitemap on Jul 13, it was processed on Jul 14.

4. Redirect

As part of the migration process, Google recommends that you then "Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects"  (full article here)

Finding http links on an https website - Part 2

Since writing this post, and given that secure (https) websites are becoming more popular, Scrutiny can now specifically look out for links to the http version of your site, alert you to the fact if there are any, and offer full details.

This new behaviour is all switched on by default, but there are two new checkboxes in Preferences

Taken separately, that first checkbox is quite important because if you're scanning an https website, you probably don't want http versions of your pages included in your xml sitemap.

All of this is in Scrutiny v6.4 which will be released as beta soon. If you're interested in checking it out, please just ask.

Finding http links on an https website

A couple of Scrutiny support calls have recently been along the lines "Why is your tool reporting a number of http links on my site? All internal links are https://  Is this a bug?"

In both cases, an internal link did exist on the site with the http scheme. Scrutiny treats this link as internal (as long as it has the same domain) follows it, and then all relative links will of course have the http scheme as well.

[Update - since writing this post, new functionality has been added to Scrutiny - read about that here]

I'm thinking about three things:

1. The 'Locate' function is ideal for tracing the rogue link that shunts Scrutiny (and a real user of course) over to the http site. In the shot below we can see where that happened (ringed) and so it's easy to see the offending link url, the link text and the page it appears on. Does this useful feature need to be easier to find?

2. Does a user expect that when they start at a https:// url, that an http:// link would be considered internal (and followed) or external (and not followed) ? Should this be a preference? (Possibly not needed as it's simple to add a rule that says 'do not check urls containing http://www.mysite.com)

3. Should Scrutiny alert the user if they start at an https:// url and an http:// version is found while scanning? After all, this is at the heart of the problem described above; the users assumed that all links were https:// and it wasn't obvious why they had a number of http:// links in their results.

Any thoughts welcome; email me or use the comments below.