Adding the ‘s’

Let’s Encrypt has made it much easi­er for web sites to use https instead of http, even those on shared host­ing. In my case, all I needed to do was ask my ISP, Cana­dian Web Host­ing, to move my accounts to a serv­er that sup­ports a cPan­el exten­sion (I assume this one). Installing the certs is trivial.

Chan­ging the basic Word­Press set­ting was easy — update the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) set­tings in Gen­er­al. This did break a lot of image links, mostly because I’ve had my blog on Word­Press for so long that I still had all my images in a cus­tom image dir­ect­ory and the gal­lery could­n’t find them any more. That took a cer­tain amount of fid­dling, and I haven’t yet got all the images in the old posts back to the way they were.

Anoth­er thing that broke was my spam detec­tion. I used Spam Karma for many years, and even after it was no longer updated it was suit­able for my needs. But it does­n’t work with https for some reas­on. I’ve now switched to Anti­s­pam Bee and find it does what I need. I haven’t noticed any spam slip­ping through, nor real com­ments being marked as spam. Most of the com­pet­it­ors had some fea­ture I did­n’t like, such as by default delet­ing com­ments without my hav­ing a chance to check them. That would be use­ful on sites with lots of spam, but not neces­sary for mine. It has a well-deserved high rat­ing on the Word­Press plu­gin site.

Over­all, switch­ing my sites to https cost me a couple of hours work and the time wait­ing for the new serv­er DNS to propag­ate. Well worth it.