Securing a Github/Netlify site

I’m hosting a simple personal/academic website on a Github Pages repo, and using Netlify to connect it to my custom URL, tudorpopescu dot com. When I navigate to the site using my custom URL (but not when I use the repo URL), in any browser, I see a warning icon about the site being “Not secure”. The Chrome documentation suggests this means “something is severely wrong with the privacy of this site’s connection”.

“Enforce HTTPS” is already enabled in my repo’s settings:


The documentation mentions the ‘not secure’ warning can be fixed by replacing all instances of HTTP with HTTPS, in case the site serves mixed content. In the HTML files under my _layouts folder I found no reference to HTTP however, and I cannot use search since my repo is forked (I am editing directly on github dot com).

Netlify’s settings don’t seem to allow the necessary certificate in order to make the site use HTTPS: I get “We could not provision a Let’s Encrypt certificate for your custom domain.” when I try to provision a certificate. I followed Netlify’s troubleshooter, but the error I get is not found there.

The reason why I even have Netlify as a “link in the chain” is because it was indicated in a beginner’s guide on how to build a simple website. But can I actually remove this link, since presumably I can use my custom URL in Github Pages alone, and would then presumably have no more problems with the HTTPS?!

How can I fix this privacy issue? Thanks!

I’m on chrome on my phone and both of these look fine on https


Can I suggest use GitHub Pages OR Netlify? They both are similar tools and it is weird to use both. GitHub Pages supports using a custom URL as well as Netlify. Find a tutorial online for adding the CNAME file.

Or just move your site to Netlify completely and run
jekyll build as the command and serve _site folder. You don’t even have to run bundle install as Netlify will do it for you.
The logs are more detailed than GH Pages making it easy to debug, you can use custom gem versions and you can even auto build a preview on PR before you merge code.

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Thank you Michael. The https warning disappeared without me having done anything. I’ll look into using either netlify or GH Pages, it’s indeed pointless to use both. I was misled by a rather poor step by step guide that recommended this.

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Site looks great!

If you just set up the site it takes a while for https to kick in.

One thing that’s tripped me up is using external images that I didn’t make sure were https.

Netlify is cool because it has native forms, but with GitHub Actions, anything is possible…

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