A couple of clients of mine seemed to have some serious problems with their wordpress sites starting from last friday. At first they seemed to be unrelated but by the end of the day I had noticed that they all had the following in common:
- This issue was only occuring on Chrome
- The site when viewed in Chrome would try to redirect to the https (secure) version of the site
- When this version of the site couldnt be found a 404 (page not found error) would occur
At first I thought it was possible that this was caused by Google rolling out their http 2.0 protocol (SPDY) and maybe was a teething issue.
Then somebody else can to me on Saturday with a similar issue, his WordPress site wouldnt load on Chrome. I tried it on my PC and it worked fine – I was a little stumped. Then I realised all of these site’s also ran the popular WordPress ecommerce plugin ‘Woocommerce’. I then began wondering if Chrome was detecting ecommerce on your site then forcing your through https (which turned out to be half true).
Here’s the Fix
After doing a little bit of googling I realised that an update to Google Chrome had just been release: version 44. Then I found this article by Mattias Geniar.
As it turns out Chrome was sending a HTTPS: 1 header on every request by default, thus forcing a version of the https://yoursite.com to load.
[dt_highlight color=””]Breaking news: Looks like an update to Chrome has just been released that fixes this bug. Try upgrading chrome to fix the issue. All you need to do is update Chrome and you will be able to get back into your WordPress admin (wp-admin)[/dt_highlight]
Its probably also important to fix the issue on your site for anybody who hasnt updated Chrome. Now that you can get back in all you need to do is:
- Update your version of Woocommerce to the latest version (if you are running woocommerce), or
- Download and install this plugin
