I have received the ssl certificate for my brand new site salisviluppo.42web.io on infinityfree and when I enter the Wordpress message board or when I view the site I find at the top next to the address bar that there is the ssl certificate, navigation is safe. But then when I go to check the site with gtmetrix, it gives me an error
An error occurred fetching the page: HTTPS error: certificate verify failed
There may be a connectivity issue between your server and the
GTmetrix test server. Please login to try testing from another test
location or try again later.
Then I go to www.sslshopper.com to verify the ssl certificate and it says
The certificate is not trusted in all web browsers. You may need to install an Intermediate/chain certificate to link it to a trusted root certificate. Learn more about this error. The fastest way to fix this problem is to contact your SSL provider.
What do I need to do to get gtmetrix working properly on the site?
In my experience, you can cheat around this in GTMetrix by entering the URL with http:// instead of https://. Your website will handle the redirect and the GTMetrix crawler doesn’t care about incomplete SSL certificates, as long as the first request succeeds.
Admin’s suggestion doesn’t work for me: i.e. Gtmetrix always gives me this message
“The SSL certificate for this site is not trusted in all web browsers.
You may have an incorrectly installed SSL certificate. Check your SSL certificate at SSLShopper.”
That’s fine with me as well, but how do I test the speed of my site? do I use other sites like pagespeed and webpagetest?
I checked your site and I see you also have Mixed Content warnings. I don’t know if those are what causes GTMetrix to fail for you when it usually doesn’t for me, but it’s worth a shot, and you’ll definitely need to fix it at some point.
The problem seems to be caused by your logo image not using secure URLs. So you’ll probably want to fix that one.
Also, I see that you are using Elementor. If it’s working fine for you, then you do you, but know that many people are having problems with Elementor because it’s a very complex and heavy plugin that doesn’t work well on free hosting.
When you access a website over HTTPS, browsers demand that all URLs on the page use HTTPS as well. After all, if there are any URLs which load data over an insecure request, that could allow an attacker to hijack the insecure connection and sneak malicious code into the page. “Mixed Content” means that your page has a mix of HTTP and HTTPS URLs, and browsers don’t like that.
That’s why your logo URL does not work: browsers block it because it uses an insecure URL on a secure page.
thanks for the explanation
the strange thing is how can an image uploaded from my pc have an unsecure url?
Not even having made it clickable, so not having linked to that image at all?
Or maybe a default link is put in and I didn’t notice it
It doesn’t matter what the image is or where it came from, all that matters is how it’s referenced in the page code. My guess it has something to do with Elementor and how the site was set up, but I don’t know enough about Elementor to say for certain.
Elementor takes the site_url parameter in your WordPress settings. If you created your site without SSL and then applied for a certificate, your website settings will remain HTTP (without S) if you didn’t update those. Elementor would require a refresh on it’s data even if you did update the settings.
For now, you can check your website settings from the WordPress dashboard > Settings > General. Check for the URLs to see if they are HTTPS, and update and save them if necessary. Then go head to Elementor > Options and you should see refresh Elementor Data, click on that and everything should be working again.
In case that didn’t help, manually replace the URL using the Elementor-provided tool in the options menu from within the dashboard.
If you have any caching plugins, remove them as they will cause this type of issue as well, as they hold on to your old pages even after updating.
Logos are stored in Customizer (outside of Elementor Settings), although the Elementor editor can edit that value as well, that is indeed a seperate thing to update individually.
if the cache plugins are causing these problems and therefore it is not advisable to install them. What do you recommend installing as a plugin?
At the moment I haven’t installed any, but a while ago I liked how EWWW worked as it seemed to do everything, even photo optimisation. For this last photo function, what do you recommend?
A good cache plugin is generally helpful. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are popular options that should work quite well here. Just stick to one though, multiple caching plugins just adds bloat at best and will interfere with each other and cause more issues at worst.
Elementor is a very heavy plugin, and our hosting technically does not meet their requirements. So if you can do without it, please do.
Backup/migration plugins are also a bad decision, packing up an entire website is a big and complicated process that uses a lot of server power, often result in account suspensions and an unusable backup.
And in general, don’t install more plugins than you need. All plugins add more code, which adds more server load (slowing down your site and reducing traffic capacity), and provides more opportunity for things to break.
You should only install a plugin when you actually need it, an “essentials list” simply does not exist. If you need suggestions on good plugins, maybe we can start with understanding your website genre and requirements, i.e. blog? ecommerce? album?
I normally optimize and resize my images locally before uploading them, optimizing images can help with loading speed but it creates duplicate copies on the server, making managing files a bit less convenient. If that’s the case, personally I would prefer having it in optimized state from the source, which is before upload.
At the moment I only have Astra, Elementor installed on the site, and then I’m experimenting with some plugins to expand the functionality of elementor (Happy addon and Royal elementor addon). Enough. I was also going to try and install Essential addon to replace Royal elementor addon, but at the moment I am just testing.
Then when I’m done with the graphics, I intend to try some cache plugins, especially those mentioned by Admin
My aim is to be able to create a site with a blog with a total of 4-6 pages. And to be able to customise the blog pages, the one that shows the grid for the various articles.
Having Elementor with Astra is already one of the best combination you can have on WordPress, so that’s totally fine.
Royal Elementor Addon isn’t quite good and you can remove that if you do not need it. Essential addon is ok. You should only install the Elementor blocks plugin for the set of blocks you need, do not install with a collection / own-it sentiment, it comes at a performance cost for each of these plugin installed, especially when loading the editor. When launching Elementor editor, it pulls a list of installed blocks and loads all plugins that might interact with Elementor, this way it gets all the things it needs to provide you with the editing interface, but this makes it dreadfully slow and resource intensive. In a free hosting like InfinityFree, this is going to hit resource limits and you’ll get a site suspension if this repeats frequently.
If you do graphics the right way, you do not need a cache plugin as those files are static anyways.
A blog with 4-6 pages shouldn’t be a rocket-science project, you can easily achieve by importing a decent Starter Template design with Astra and get to writing.
I do not use online software, instead I use ffmpeg (a command line tool) for maximum optimization. However if you want a GUI, cloudconvert is a good tool for this purpose.