Why can't I test my own links in preview mode?

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  pauldellis · Member · Dec 8, 2014 at 10:01 pm

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  My posts sometimes contain links to existing posts/pages on my site. When I am previewing unpublished posts, I click these links to see if they work. Lately I have been getting a “Your connection is not private” error message from Google Chrome, my preferred browser. (I would attach a screenshot but that doesn’t seem possible.) The result is I can’t test the links prior to publication. Any suggestions on how to get rid of this error message? I’ve never had a problem checking links before. Thanks in advance.

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

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Dec 8, 2014 at 11:30 pm

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  Hi Paul,

  This may be because you enabled HTTPS. Please note that this is expected. When you connect to your Dashboard over an HTTPS connection, we use an SSL certificate to encrypt your connection. SSL certificates need to be signed to a specific domain, and we can’t provide certificates for every mapped domain, so our certificate is signed for WordPress.com.

  When you connect to your Dashboard via your own domain but your security software sees a certificate signed to http://wordpress.com/ it’s alerting you that WordPress.com may be intercepting your connection, which of course is perfectly fine. You may also see this warning if you attempt to reach your blog (not your Dashboard) using “https” instead of “http” in your blog URL.

  So, take a look at the link and remove the ‘s’ and then warning should go away.

  Cheers!

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  pauldellis · Member · Dec 9, 2014 at 12:51 am

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  Thanks gracejiyoung,

  How did I enable HTTPS? And how do I disable it? As far as I can tell I’m doing nothing different from what I’ve done for years and this problem emerged by itself. I could be wrong and maybe I’ve done something inadvertently, but I don’t know what.

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Dec 9, 2014 at 1:07 am

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  You can disable it via these instructions:

  http://en.support.wordpress.com/https/

  If you just continue you probably won’t see the warning anymore, but if you want to disable it please view the link above. It’ll only be for administration pages.

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  pauldellis · Member · Dec 9, 2014 at 1:27 am

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  I went to my Personal Settings to deselect the “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages” (as described in the above link) and found it wasn’t selected (which makes sense since I didn’t know what it was before today).

  So I haven’t selected HTTPS yet I seem to have it. The other puzzling thing is that the warning message from Chrome only appears for unpublished posts viewed in preview mode. The links on published posts work fine.

  Postscript: I have just discovered that if I choose the “Proceed to <blogname> unsafe” option on the Google Chrome warning page, everything reverts to normal and the links DO work fine in preview mode, albeit it with the HTTPS part of the URL marked in red and crossed out. I can live with that.

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  gracejiyoung · Member · Dec 9, 2014 at 5:22 pm

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  The other puzzling thing is that the warning message from Chrome only appears for unpublished posts viewed in preview mode. The links on published posts work fine.

  Yes that is the https. It looks like there is some forced https going on.

  I have just discovered that if I choose the “Proceed to <blogname> unsafe” option on the Google Chrome warning page, everything reverts to normal and the links DO work fine in preview mode, albeit it with the HTTPS part of the URL marked in red and crossed out. I can live with that.

  Sounds great!

  Happy blogging :)