We manage various software and website add-ons. WooCommerce is the eCommerce add-on commonly used by WordPress website owners to do business online.
Online transactions involve sensitive customer information, such as credit card details. Payment gateways and the site must be secured using SSL certificates to protect this data.
Without an SSL certificate, the financial details are sent in plain text to the server and can be easily intercepted by the attackers. This can negatively affect your business.
Recently, we were contacted by one of our service users who was receiving errors related to WooCommerce SSL and was preventing payment processing on the ‘Checkout’ page of the sites during transactions.
The error shown on the WooCommerce status report page was “Your store is not using HTTPS”.
WooCommerce showing the https error
This error occurs when WordPress cannot verify the SSL security of your site. Today, we’ll see what causes the WooCommerce https error on your site and how to solve it.
How to solve the WooCommerce https error on your website?
WordPress has two URL settings that you can change to adjust the behavior of how WordPress works.
- WordPress Address – This is the URL to access the WordPress site.
- Site address / SITEURL – This is the address where the main WordPress files reside.
If these URL settings are configured to use the URL “https://domain.com/wordpress” instead of “https://domain.com/wordpress”, it can give the WooCommerce https error.
To resolve this error, the WordPress URL and site URL have been updated to use the HTTPS URL using the “Settings> General” option in the WordPress Admin panel.
However, if SSL is not configured correctly or the SSL certificate has expired, these URLs may show errors. We then validate secure URLs before updating them in the administrator interface.
A WooCommerce site that was working fine may show this https error if there were updates of the OpenSSL binary on the server. In these cases, we configure the latest OpenSSL and recompile PHP on the server to reflect the changes.
Another setting we have to confirm is that ‘Force secure verification’ is enabled in WooCommerce settings. This is to ensure that online payments are made securely using the SSL URL.
The Force SSL setting (WooCommerce> Settings> Checkout> Checkout Options> Force secure out) in WooCommerce ensures that certain pages are displayed only in HTTPS when enabled. These pages are:
check out
Checkout> Pay (period)
