I ran into a situation today where the “redirect method” dropdown option in Settings -> General for the Really Simple SSL plugin was greyed-out.
Given that there’s always a red exclamation point there, I assumed that maybe they require you to read their warning first, but actually (and confusingly), it’s entirely unrelated.
Now, call me an idealist, but obviously it should say WHY this is greyed out. I find this type of terrible design truly infuriating. It doesn’t take any special knowledge or expertise to realize that if you’re going to disable the ability to use a feature, you should say why. DUH.
It took me a minute or two to figure out why it was being disabled. I thought that maybe something was being specified in the WordPress config file, or perhaps the .htaccess file itself couldn’t be written to.
But no, it’s nothing like that. It’s entirely on the plugin.
So what happened?
How to fix the greyed-out dropdown so you can select a redirect method
- Go to the Really Simple SSL dashboard, and click “Activate SSL”
That’s it. Now you can select a redirect method.
Why does this work?
More than likely, like me, you bulk-disabled some plugins, including Really Simple SSL. When you do this, the plugin essentially remains inactive even after reactivating it. You’d think that all pages, including the settings page, would make it clear that it’s not actually doing anything.
But nope. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.
The dropdown for “Redirect method” is greyed-out and not selectable because you aren’t actually using SSL yet, so it won’t let you set up the redirect.
Once you activate SSL, it gives you the option again.
This plugin has been getting increasingly obnoxious over the last couple years, and in general, you probably don’t actually need any of its features. I recommend simply adding your own .htaccess redirect rule manually. It’s incredibly easy, and you can find the line you need to add over on our .htaccess code snippets page.
Hopefully with that in place, you can do away with this plugin that is starting to get very heavy-weight and bombard you with pointless, annoying notifications and announcements constantly in the backend.
You’re welcome!
