WPress site times out after switching to https!

Yesterday, I made the mistake of adding an “s” to my Wordpress site URL: From http:// → https://theadvancedaudiophile.infy.uk. Ever since, I can no longer access my site, and the only error message is “Connection has timed out”. No other clue as to what the real problem is. Even though I have debug turned on in wp-config, and error reporting in PHP Directives.

I have tried so many things to fix this, even ChatGPT 2nd tier support couldn’t help. After changing the URL to “https” in Wordpress, I successfully installed a Google SSL certificate in my admin panel here. (I tested this as working, with a 3rd party site).

I added code in WP’s .htaccess file to force HTTPS, as prescribed in the help files on IFree. I added code in wp-config also (“force_ssl_admin”), and made sure the URLs listed there were https. I also changed the URLs in my PHP database (“home”/“site url”). In both wp_ and wpus_ tables. I renamed my plugins folder to disable it, and also changed my Wordpress theme to twentysixteen, in PHP. I cleared browser caches, turned off the WP cache, and tested in private browser windows, etc. etc.

I am stuck now as to what to do, as I don’t want to have to reinstall my Wordpress yet again. One possible clue: I noticed in the Wordpress management page in “Softaculous”, that it still has the old site URL of “http://”. It also has the wrong database table name of “wp28”. I am not sure if the information on this page affects my Wordpress installation, but even if it does, I am not able to correct the record, as the fields are grayed out.

Please point me in the right direction…

After checking my Wordpress site on SSL.org ssl checker, I am getting the message: “Incomplete certificate chain. Certificate is not trusted.”. (Site: https://theadvancedaudiophile.infy.uk)

I installed a Google certificate yesterday, which is said to be trustworthy, and the Admin Panel says it is successfully installed. But I have been unable to access my site, with a “timed out” error, ever since I installed the SSL certificate, as mentioned in another message. Could -this- be the reason why?

I would just like to forget about this “SSL” business, since it’s been nothing but a pile of headaches. But according to what I read, I can’t undo the change for another 90 days! And I can’t wait that long for my site to work again…

No issue

Please read

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Your website is working fine from here using HTTPS.

I don’t know why you’re having trouble accessing your website. Even if the SSL certificate is invalid or missing, you would get an SSL related error. If you see a timeout error, it means you are unable to connect to the server entirely, at which point it should be irrelevant what you have setup SSL wise.

If you want to revert away from HTTPS, you can do that right now. Waiting for the SSL certificate to expire will not help you there (see point above). Instead, you’ll want to:

After that, you should be able to access http://theadvancedaudiophile.infy.uk/ (WITHOUT the s) and use your website again.

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n/a

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Thanks for the helpful reply. While I understand that I “shouldn’t” lose access to my site after adding an “s” to the URL in Wordpress, I did lose access immediately after making that change, after immediately logging out and back in. So it appeared to be the reason. But I finally discovered the “real” problem…

The reason you saw my site back up, is because after waiting around for hours for a solution to this, I had to move forward and say goodbye to all the hours of work I had put in, and start all over again from a fresh install.

But the goal from the start was to restore my old Wordpress install from another site. Each time I tried to restore from various backups, I ran into problems. That was no doubt the reason for the “Timed Out” error, and the one where it will log in to Wordpress, but only show a blank page.

After much detective work in PhPMyAdmin, the culprit was found to be the “user role” table in the old database (from a WP 4.9 install). Maybe something in it is not compatible with WP 6.x, or what have you. So I copied all the tables from the old database into the new one, except for 'user role". Instead I kept the new data for the “user role” field, and now I am able to log in and see the admin pages and everything.

Hope that info helps someone that might be in a similar predicament when restoring an old Wordpress SQL backup into a new database and webhost…

UPDATE: Despite thinking it’s all good now, I received the same “Timed Out’ error again later, after cleaning up some Wordpress files in my FTP File Manager. As before, it either gives 'Timed Out” error message, or the page remains blank, or the Wordpress login screen is ill-formatted text only.

The fix was to remove these two lines from my WP-CONFIG.PHP file:

define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘https://myinfinityfree.site’);
define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘https://myinfinityfree.site’);

…which I added in order to fix the ‘Timed Out’ error! So it appears there may be more than one issue causing this problem.

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