What is SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT?

Don’t worry, I didn’t know what the heck it was either. It kept popping up every time I did anything, on the front end or the back end of my website. A security warning would pop up saying SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT and I had no idea where it was coming from, and I had no idea how to fix it. Let’s go through what I did to solve this WordPress issue once and for all.

1st Thing’s First

The most likely issue is a plugin conflict of some kind. Read the error message carefully, and see if that gives you any clues as to what might be causing the problem. In this case, it mentions SSL. The problem is, Design Crawl isn’t using SSL. Ok, so the very next thing I do is look at plugins. Usually, 99% of your website problems come from plugin conflicts. These conflicts are common, so there’s really no avoiding them. You just have to address them as they pop up. My Method for determining if any plugins are causing the issue goes like this.

  1. I disable any cache plugin I have installed 1st.
  2. If that doesn’t solve it, next I disable any other performance or membership plugins.
  3. Then, I’ll disable all other plugins at once.
  4. If that solves the problem, and the site comes back 100%, I activate plugins 1 by 1 until I receive the error again.
  5. That’s how you find the problem child.
  6. Then, you can research the problem and find a possible solution, or an alternative plugin.

The Bad News

The bad news is that I disabled all of my plugins, and that didn’t work. Everything I did returned the SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT message. next, I changed themes. Sometimes themes get updated and no longer play nice with your plugins, or you run into a bug. After changing themes, I still kept getting the SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT message every time I clicked on something.

Call Support

So, after all of this, I called support, which is Bluehost. If anyone can figure it out, it’s usually Bluehost. They’re always reliable for me, and that’s why I have stuck with them, and why I promote them. They spent almost 2 hours on the phone with me. Unfortunately, we tried everything, and I mean everything to try to resolve the issue. The representative did the best he could, but we were all out of new things to try. We even re-installed a fresh version of the core WordPress files. Still, we couldn’t resolve the issue.

I Never Give Up

That’s part of my personality. I’ve figured out and solved problems for clients, even advanced ones with WordPress that I’d never heard of before, so this was no different. I was determined, so I started doing some research. I kept finding that it mentioned my site was trying to connect to an https page, even though my site was set to http. That was a step in the right direction.

Then, I stumbled upon an article that mentioned how Cloudflare provides free SSL to its customers, even the free ones. Well, with Bluehost, I have Cloudflare for free. Also, I knew that I’d originally set up Design Crawl on Cloudflare, to help it run faster.

The Solution

It turns out, when I went to Cloudflare, there was a setting that had it set to SSL, forcing https where it didn’t apply. Once I disabled Cloudflare, I didn’t receive anymore SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT messages. I was in the clear! So, if you’re using a CDN, and it has built in SSL support, try disabling it, or try disabling that part of it to correct the issue.

Have you ever encountered a mystery problem like this? how did you solve it? I’d love to hear your stories, so share them in the comments section below.