Indexability and crawling
How to fix mixed content warnings
These secure pages load images, scripts, or stylesheets over plain http. Browsers block or downgrade those requests, so parts of the page may not appear, and the padlock is lost.
What it is, and what it costs
Mixed content is an
https:// page pulling resources from http://. Browsers flag the page as not fully secure and often refuse to load the insecure parts, which can break layout or functionality. It undermines the trust signal HTTPS is there to provide.How to fix it
Change every resource URL on the page to https:// (or protocol-relative //), so everything loads securely.
- WordPress: a search-replace plugin, or Really Simple SSL, rewrites old
http://asset URLs across the database. - Hand-coded: update the
srcandhrefof images, scripts, and stylesheets to https.
How to check your site
Open the page and watch the browser console for "mixed content" warnings, or look for a broken padlock in the address bar.
Questions people ask
- Why did this appear after moving to HTTPS?
- Migrations often leave old hard-coded
http://asset URLs behind. A site-wide search-replace is the usual cleanup.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to find secure pages loading insecure resources.
See also
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.