Multisite broken after forcing HTTPS

  • Apologies in advance for being a complete n00b, but I can’t seem to Google my way to an answer for this (perhaps I don’t know the appropriate question to ask).

    Preface:
    CPanel deployment with a multisite/network configuration on 6.1. Domains are aliases and everything seems to live in one webroot. I honestly don’t remember how to got them to map but they “work”.

    Issue:
    I recently went on an “update everything” spree after noticing some strange logs and managed to enable “force HTTPS for all sites”. I know HTTPS is the standard, but I have 2 very basic sites that are quite literally 5 pages of information with no blogs or accounts etc. I thought it would be trivial to simply grab a couple Lets Encrypt certs for the sites but it’s proven to be too great a challenge (or I simply haven’t found the right multisite-ssl-for-dummies walkthrough).

    My pain CPanel domain was auto-provisioned with a free cert from the hosting provider and it is working just fine with HTTPS. The rest of the sites (parked/aliases) are not. They are all complaining about a mismatch in the common name (they are mapped to TLD and not subdomain/subfolder).

    What I really want to do is just flip all the sites back to HTTP but I cannot for the life of me figure out where it’s being forced. I have checked the HTACCESS and WP-Config files, have checked the site settings in the network config and every plugin I could think of, but none of that is what is (obviously) forcing HTTPS. I took a quick look at the database but have no idea where I would even find this value there.

    I’m really hoping this rings a bell for someone. I’d be happy to provide additional context/information. MANY thanks in advance.

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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    WP determines whether to use SSL or not from server properties in $_SERVER, which come from the server’s configuration files. Since all network sites utilize the same server, the default is to enable or disable SSL for all network sites. It is possible to override configuration on a domain’s virtual host entry, so varying SSL capability by domain is feasible. You likely would need your host’s assistance to accomplish this.

    Ideally all modern sites should have SSL certs. You should be able to obtain SSL certs for any subdomain/domain name and install them on the server. How to do so manually varies by host and can be quite convoluted and confusing. Doing this manually with LE certs is not very fruitful because the certs need frequent renewal. You would really want to stay with host provided auto-provisioning. If all of your sites are merely subdomains of one common domain name, ideally you’d want a cert common name with wild card sub domains so one cert can cover all subdomains. How feasible this would be depends on the cert authority and your host.

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