SSL Connection Errors and Fixes: Desktop Browsers (Part 1)

WordPress citizens, welcome back yet again to your WordPress agency for development of choice for a two-part tutorial. Today we’ll deal with SSL connection errors and how to fix them regardless of your device or browser!

SSL Connection Errors

Now those of you who know what SSL Connection errors are, you know from experience, and you know them well. For the rest of us, these are errors that we might encounter while trying to access any online content over a secure connection, like HTTPS (HTTP Secure), and they come in many forms, sometimes because of server trouble and other times because we’re configured incorrectly at our end. For any expert help with SSL configurations, go ahead and hit us up at Vipe Studio or any reputable WordPress agency for development.

A proper SSL certificate, the likes of which are easily obtainable these days, can be the one line of defense against cybercrime you sorely need. However, even with an impeccable certificate, you can stumble into an error if there are sub-optimal configurations in your local setup.

If you run the website, you can easily rectify server-side misconfigurations, but today let’s look at how we can overcome SSL errors caused by something wrong on the device end of the connection, specifically your desktop browser:

On Google Chrome

Here are the ‘Basic Three’ fixes for Chrome (and other browsers):

1. Ensure that you’re running the latest version of the browser, Chrome in this case, or are updated to it.

2. Verify that the system time and date are proper and synchronized to a good timeserver. If the time on your machine is not correct, the browser can no longer validate what might otherwise be a perfectly good SSL certificate.

On Windows, find ‘Time & Language’ under ‘Settings’ and confirm that the time and the time zone are both set to synchronize automatically. If that doesn’t work, feel free to manually set these to the right values. On macOS, under the ‘System Preferences’ menu, pick ‘Date & Time’ and verify that the time and date will automatically update.

3. Another way to handle this is what we call clearing the SSL slate. What this does is to clear all SSL certificates saved on your computer, so that the next time the browser encounters the website in question, it will re-verify the certificate and, in doing so, likely fix the error.

On Windows, find ‘Internet Options’ in the Start menu and in the ‘Internet Properties’ window it leads to, locate ‘Content’ and ‘Clear SSL slate’. On macOS, locate the ‘Utilities’ menu, then under ‘Keychain Access’, pick ‘Keychains’ in the side menu and then ‘System’, and this will reveal a list of all the SSL certificates stored on your machine, which you can then select and delete manually, starting with one that corresponds to the website you’re having trouble with.

After these ‘Basic Three’ steps, go back to Chrome and check that the error has disappeared. If not, in Chrome’s ‘Settings’, select ‘Clear browsing data’ checkmark cookies and cache from the list, then ‘Clear data’. If this doesn’t solve the issue either, then as a final effort, you can try turning off your antivirus and firewall briefly. While this is almost certainly not the issue in most situations, ruling it out is a smart step to take. If, after all these fixes, you’re still being shown connection errors, then you can be sure that the server is at fault.

Firefox SSL Connection Errors

The ‘Basic Three’ fixes work the same for all browsers, including Firefox, so once they’ve been employed and if the problem still persists, we need to try and clear cookies and cache on Firefox as we did with Chrome. In Firefox’s ‘Options’, find ‘Cookies and Site Data’ under ‘Privacy and Security’, and ‘Clear Data’.

Safari Connection Errors

With Safari, we’ll perform the ‘Basic Three’ fixes specifically for macOS, and just like with Firefox, if nothing else works, we’ll need to clear the cookies and cache for Safari. On your macOS device, open the ‘Settings’ menu in Safari, and select ‘Clear History’. That’s it. Verify that the connection error has been resolved, and if not, as you know by now, there’s nothing more that can be done locally, and the error has been generated server-side.

That’s a wrap on part 1 of how to fix SSL connection errors, and we’ll be back next time with more scenarios and fixes for these errors, so until then, stay safe and (HTTP) secure!

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