Alex Cooper

Hi DannyMe, I work with Davemacgb – he works on our servers, firewalls, balancers, etc. and I carry out the website development. More than happy to work together to find a solution to this as it’s been incredibly painful for us.

I can’t honestly believe that there isn’t more of an outcry over this as we’ve been forced to put in some huge (what we hope to be short term) changes to cater for this http / https issue for an update that WordPress themselves described as “just another number for us after 3.9 and before 4.1” and without any mention of this new “feature” at http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Version_4.0.

It has so far cost us new certificates and a day and a half of downtime on a major website while we tried to figure out what the cause was. Your initial post was incredibly helpful in our diagnosis, actually, so thank you for that.

Jan Dembowski:
We also got the same infinite redirect shown in Google Chrome. What appeared to be happening was that the site believed, rightly, that it was in a non-ssl environment but it then chose to act on it and redirected to http://site.name (non SSL domain). We had an htaccess rule in place at that location to go back to https://site.name which then sent traffic back again and so the cycle continued. When we removed the http:// to https:// rule, the site loaded but all of the resources (stylesheets, JavaScript, etc.) were using http:// so didn’t load. This was despite the siteurl and home fields in the options table being set to https. We found ourselves having to hack the core code initially but it got to a point where it wasn’t a sustainable solution.

It seems as though WordPress now makes that decision of whether to use http:// or https:// instead of leaving it up to us and what’s written into the required fields in the database / settings page as versions 3.9 and earlier did.