Secure and nonsecure items

Error messages “Unauthenticated content” or “connection partially encrypted”

Problem:

One or more of these things happen on some or all of my “secure” pages, such as Login, My Account and Checkout.

  • I am seeing a broken padlock

  • When I click the Log In link as a customer i get prompted with the security prompts stating:

    “This page contains both secure and nonsecure items. Do you want to display the nonsecure items?”

  • “Page contains unauthenticated content”

  • “connection partially encrypted”

Solution:

That indicates that somewhere in your templates or stylesheets you have hard-coded actual URL links to http://xxxxxxxxx, instead of using relative paths. See relative URLs for more information.

This can also happen if you have added banners with http:// links and not told them to skip display on SSL pages.

This can also happen if you have added click-tracking tools to your site via JavaScript, which link to http:// pages somewhere.

You can identify most culprits by searching your browser’s View Source for: src="http://

Then work through your template files and stylesheets and remove those hard-coded links. If they are caused by click-tracking scripts somewhere, try converting them to https:// links or contact the vendor for assistance with alternate scripts.

Basically, never hard-code a full http:// URL into any page/template/stylesheet on your site unless you know for certain that doing so will not produce this sort of error. This is especially true for <img src=...> and <script src=...> tags.

ANOTHER TIP:

Sometimes these same errors are caused by images mentioned in your stylesheet. Double-check to be sure that all those images actually exist. If they don’t, then they’ll produce 404 Not Found errors, and sometimes that’ll create a “loop” to attempt displaying a 404-error-page, which can in turn throw even more messages.

And, if you have created a custom 404 page, then if that page has any missing images referenced on it, or on its stylesheets, you could end up in a loop that not only throws security/encryption errors, but also creates excessive traffic in your hosting account, which will make your hosting company unhappy.




Still have questions? Use the Search box in the upper right, or try the full list of FAQs. If you can't find it there, head over to the Zen Cart support forum and ask there in the appropriate subforum. In your post, please include your Zen Cart and PHP versions, and a link to your site.

Is there an error or omission on this page? Please post to General Questions on the support forum. Or, if you'd like to open a pull request, just review the guidelines and get started. You can even PR right here.
Last modified March 27, 2021 by Scott C Wilson (960e2013).