The next major release of WordPress will make it much easier for users to migrate their sites from HTTP to HTTPS. It introduces new capabilities to detect if the user’s hosting environment has support for HTTPS and provides a one-click update process, handling mixed content rewrites where possible.
“A major pain point in WordPress has been the migration of a WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS: While changing the Site Address and WordPress Address to use HTTPS is trivial, updating references to the old URLs in existing content is not,” WordPress Core Committer Felix Arntz said in the ticket proposing the feature. “It cannot be accomplished within core UI and requires use of more advanced tools, such as WP-CLI or plugins like Better Search Replace, which is a no-go for most users.”
In WordPress 5.6, there is no clear guidance in the Site Health screen about how to migrate to HTTPS, even though it shows as an issue. The user would need to learn more about how to update it manually, starting with changing the site URLs.
In WordPress 5.7, if HTTPS is supported, the Site Health Status screen will notify users and guide them with a new button that updates the site with a single click. It also migrates the site content on the fly to use HTTPS for URLs. Arntz recorded a video demo of the update:
This change also comes with new environment variables and filters that allow hosting providers to change the URLs linked in the HTTPS status check in Site Health, so they can more effectively manage it for their customers’ hosting options. This is similar to how hosts can modify URLs for updating the PHP version, which has had a positive impact on getting sites running on supported versions of PHP.
It’s important to note that the streamlined HTTP to HTTPS migration in 5.7 does not handle updating content in the database. Also, if a site’s URLs are controlled by constants, the update is not possible to complete automatically. In these instances, the HTTPS status check on the Site Health screen will inform the user why the site would need to be manually updated.
More technical details are available in the ticket and commit message, and a dev note should be forthcoming.