Site Certificate

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  grahamheeley · Member · May 30, 2015 at 7:55 pm

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  I have registered another domian but when I try to open the link either in Chrome or IE I get a warning about the site certificate. This may obviously put some users off going onto the site.

  Can you advise what I should do?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  alexjgustafson · Member · May 31, 2015 at 4:59 pm

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  Visiting a site with custom domain on WordPress.com using https causes an error, but visiting them on http does not.

  The reason why is that we maintain our security certifcates using WordPress.com as the domain, since that’s where we serve all our content from.

  When the browser sees ‘https’ in the URL, that really just tells the browser to check the SSL certificate. When the browser sees a custom domain, but checks the certificate and sees its made for WordPress.com. The browser then sends up a warning because of the mismatch. Readers can still get around this warning, but it’s less than ideal, especially in Chrome.

  So right now it’s best only to share the http (not https) URL for sites with a custom domain.

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  grahamheeley · Member · May 31, 2015 at 5:08 pm

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  So having registered that domain name and paid for it and then registered the address with google. What should /must I do?

  Can you advise in non technical plain English please?

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  alexjgustafson · Member · May 31, 2015 at 7:01 pm

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  There’s no error if you visit the site at this web address:

  http://rothervalecommunityband.com

  Only if you visit it at this web address:

  https://rothervalecommunityband.com

  I recommend you do not promote or share the https address, only the http address.

  Or, if you prefer you can move the site to another hosting service and purchase an SSL certificate for the domain. This is not an option we can provide for sites hosted on WordPress.com. You’ll see the same issue for sites like time.com and techcrunch.com, where visiting with http works correctly, but https will raise an error.

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  grahamheeley · Member · May 31, 2015 at 8:12 pm

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  Thanks for your advice. The error/warning seems to have gone from google for the moment. I wonder if google was just needing to catch up with the registration.