Hey Kevin, there can be several reasons for a 403 error. Therefore, I would suggest you look at a tutorial for this very case like this one: https://kinsta.com/blog/403-forbidden-error/

Hey Dylan, sorry to hear you are having some issues transferring your site. Here are a few possible solutions you can try out:

• Make sure the htaccess code is at the top of the file, before any WordPress-related markup
• Clear your browser and server cache
• Check that your site is not running on an NGINX server instead of Apache. htaccess doesn’t work on NGINX.

Hope this helps, let me know how it goes.

Talk to your hosting provider if the certificate is set up and works correctly. That should be your first step.

Thanks for the detailed feedback, Jon! Happy to hear things worked out for you. We’ll see how we can make the part that you addressed more clear.

The Velvet Blues URL changer worked like a dream also. It may help others to know that if your WP Theme calls headers, image sliders etc and the theme has its own control panel where you have specified which images to use, then you mayneed to change these manually.

Yes, the plugin changed the URL of the image, but the Theme customiser is using URLS that you entered – so are not updated by the plugin. I was getting a secure grey padlock, but with a yellow warning triangle for images. Once i changed these manually it is great. Thank you again for a brilliant tutorial.

As far as I know, WordPress only updates the parts of htaccess between # BEGIN WordPress and # END WordPress. If you include the new directives outside of that, they should be save.

Yet….. will the newly added redirecting sentences in the .htaccess file be overwritten if WP updates something in the file?

Kind regards
Jorn

I also had issues with the .htaccess redirect. I was placing the suggested code below the existing wordpress code with no luck. I then activated the “Really Simple SSL” plugin and it worked perfectly. I looked at the .htaccess file after and the plugin had updated the file automatically. It now looks like:

# BEGIN rlrssslReallySimpleSSL rsssl_version[3.2.6]

# END WordPress

Hey Grangher, the code in the article should be added in addition to what is already inside .htaccess. The directives that WordPress places in there are to create pretty permalinks and they should not conflict with the forced redirect to HTTPS. Have you tried this for yourself?

1. you talk about people who do not have a .htaccess. ALL WORDPRESS websites have a .htaccess file
2. You say to add your line of code, but this makes no sense as wordpress already have specific directives – see below…

The following lines exist in every wordpress website in the world:
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

3. Are you suggesting to edit these lines or to add your code above or below these lines?
If you are suggesting to add your code above or below – you now have a htaccess with 2 redirect directives doing the same thing – isnt this bad development?

If you are suggesting to edit the wordpress directive then this is extremely bad practice as your code will be overwritten by wordpress when it updates. Or if you are clever enough (but it’s not in your instructions) to add a filter to prevent wordpress doing this then you may end up with a broken site one day when wordpress needs to update it to work with new changes to it’s core code.

Please advise if I am not understanding what your tutorial is about or whether you don’t understand wordpress?

Hey Nate, glad it worked out for you. Thanks for the detailed comment!

A big stall was getting a FTP access program. I used cyberduck instead of filezilla (old laptop can’t update to most current mac OS) and followed the directions line by line. The next hurdle was backwards discovering I need to create a FTP user account on my siteground page, and then use that account for log in credentials on cyberduck. All the content in step 7 is really important! They helped me find a darn picture, buried in the wp-upload folders on siteground, that for some reason had http attached to it. After a delete, boom! SSL padlock present.

Thanks for taking the time!