Phenquestions
HTTPS Checker is a free program for Windows that provides you with the means to scan all pages of a website for HTTPS related issues.
Rolling out HTTPS on an established site has become a lot easier in recent time. While that is the case, it still very important to make sure that the implementation does not cause any issues such as duplicate content, mixed content warnings or certificate validation issues as it can backfire if that is the case.
HTTPS Checker limits the crawls per run to 250 but you may increase that limit and add functionality to it by upgrading your subscription to one of the paid plans.
Free is however a good start when it comes to checking a website initially, and it is often the case that pages share common characteristics and issues which can then be fixed once for all pages so that a scan of all pages of a site may not be necessary at all.
HTTPS Checker
The program asks for a simple registration on first start and prompts you for a url that you want to scan afterwards.
Simply enter the url in the form and wait for the scan to complete. You can limit the number of issues in the advanced options and will notice that other options, such as changing the user agent are restricted to paid accounts.
The scan may take a while to complete depending on the account level, Internet connection, site that is scanned and advanced parameters you have set before the scan.
HTTPS Checker reveals the following "global" information about the scanned pages:
- Active mixed content.
- Passive mixed content.
- Insecure redirects.
- Insecure canonical links.
- Insecure links to the same domain.
- Insecure social links.
- Insecure sitemap links
- SSL certificate validation.
- If the strict transport security header is used.
- If the HTTP site redirects to HTTPS.
- When the SSL certificate expires.
When you scroll down you find information about each page or element on the site and its issues.
There you find listed the issue found, and the code on the page that caused it. Some items may be easy to fix, for instance by switching from using a protocol, e.g. https://www.ghacks.net/, to a protocol-relative notation, e.g //www.ghacks.net/ while others may prove to be difficult to resolve.
The program does not provide you with tips on resolving the issues encountered during a scan apart from linking to guides that may assist you in that task.
You may want to re-run the scan after fixing some of the issues to make sure they are resolved. While you are limited to 250 pages per scan if you are using a free account, you don't seem to be limited in the number of scans you can run.
Closing Words
HTTPS Checker is a useful program for webmasters who are in the process of adding HTTPS to their site, or have done so in the past already. A scan reveals potential issues that are sometimes easy to overlook, especially when it comes to large sites with thousands of pages.
