Website server errors

[cheaptubes]

I launched a new website at www.cheaptubes.com and had recovered my search engine rankings as well after penguin & panda devestation. I'm was continuing to improve the site Sept 26th by adding caching of images and W3 cache but moz analytics is now saying I went from 288 medium issues to over 600 and i see the warning "45% of site pages served 302 redirects during the last crawl".  I'm not sure how to fix this?  I'm on WP using Yoast SEO so all the 301's I did are 301's not 302's.  I do have SSL, could it be Http vs Https? I've asked this question before and two very nice people replied with suggestions which I tried to implement but couldn't, i got the WP white screen of death several times. They suggested the code below.  Does anyone know how to implement this code or some other way to reduce the errors I'm getting?  I've asked this at stackoverflow with no responses.

"you have a lot of http & https issues so you should fix these with a bit of .htaccess code, as below.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^.*$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

You also have some non-www to www issues. You can fix these in .htaccess at the same time...

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

You should find this fixes a lot of your issues. Also check in your Wordpress general settings that the site is set to www.cheaptubes.com for both instances."

When I tried to do as they suggested it gave me an internal server error.  Please see the code below from .htaccess and the server error.  I took it out for now.

BEGIN WordPress

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^.$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule>

END WordPress

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@cheaptubes.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

[cheaptubes]

I've been spending time fighting other fires since posting this question. Yesterday when WP automatically updated it crashed my site.  I determined it was related to woo commerce...not good since most of my site is in the product categories & product pages of woo.  I spent all night an today on it and got my site working.  I read this forum which helped a lot

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-https-conflicts-with-woocommerce?replies=4

When I turned off the force SSL button the site came back online. In working with dream host support I learned this

I'm the WP expert!  We've heard rumblings of a strange issue in Woo where that setting is
forcing http redirects outside of the checkout page, which is causing Woo and core WP to send you back and forth between http and https when the siteurl is set to https.

_Since https://www.cheaptubes.com is set for your home AND site urls, there shouldn't need to be a force of SSL. That is, WordPress already knows it's SSL, and therefore you shouldn't need to be forcing it on those pages. _

I then received  new crawl from Moz saying I now only have 9 errors, not 600. I am recrawling to verify its fixed but I think it is now.  If anyone else ever has this issue, try unchecking the Force SSL button

[cheaptubes]

Thank you so much Trenton.  I will review the articles when I have a minute. I did try stackoverflow but my question didn't get any response.  Thanks for the links, very helpful.  I have done all the redirects thru Yoast SEO Premium.  I talked with them yesterday and they said I have to do the redirects from the old website. I will try your suggestions

[TrentonGreener]

Hello CheapTubes!

There are two independent issues taking place here. Each is contributing to your issue. I'll address each and how to fix each, but it's important to note that these are two separate issues. I'd recommending deciding which to attack first and then address the other after that.

302 Redirects

To specifically answer your question, you're getting the majority of these 302 redirects because you're using absolute linking as opposed to relative linking. Here's a link to an article explaining the difference, but TL;DR: you're defining the exact (or absolute) URL you're trying to link to as opposed to using the URI (relative linking/pathing). For a concrete example, on your homepage you have an image and text (Graphene Oxides) where the a href is: Graphene Oxides 
Since you explicitly (absolute) defined the URL, including the HTTPS, the browser then calls this page on your server. However, the content is actually housed at http://www.cheaptubes.com/product-category/graphene-oxide/ So the server tells the browser, "Hey, that file isn't there... but I'll help you out. It's actually over here" Where here = http version of page. This is exactly where the 302 takes place.

If your goal is to solve the 302 issue, all you have to do is go through and change all of your internal linking architecture to relative calls as I mentioned earlier. To continue our above example, this means changing the a href for this specific element to: Graphene Oxides
As Dmitrii alluded to above/below, you can see this for yourself via the Chrome Inspector (Ctrl+Shift+I on windows; Cmd+Opt+I on Mac).
First, go to your homepage and after opening the inspector, navigate to the 'Network' tab and check the 'Preserve log' option. Then click your 'Graphene Oxides' link and you'll notice the first line that appears in the console will have a 302 Status code. If you click on the 'Name' of this (in our example, it'll be graphene-oxide/) you can dive in further and see that 'Request URL' & the 'Location' are not the same. With the former being https and the latter being http.

If you're still unsure that this is correct, navigate to the 'Elements' tab within the Inspector and right-click the aforementioned 'Graphene Oxides' link on the actual webpage. This will highlight the exact location of the code in the Inspector console. Then right-click the a href call within the Inspector console and select the 'Edit as HTML' option. Change the a href to be Graphene Oxides and then click anywhere else and you'll notice that the element is changed within the Inspector console. Click over to the 'Network' tab again and click the clear button (looks like a circle with a line through it to the left on where the 'Preserve log' option was. Once this has been cleared, click the on-page link again and you'll see that there is no longer a 302.

htaccess Issue

I'm a little less qualified to advise you on this one. However, I can point you in the right direction. While Moz is great and amazing, for these more technical site issues I'd recommend checking out http://stackoverflow.com/. But after doing this, I'd recommend coming back here to make sure that you've got all your ducks in a row for the HTTPS transition. That said, I did some research for you.

I believe Dmitrii is correct again that the https rules should be higher than any other rules. Here's a link to a Stack Overflow article that addresses exactly your issue. And here's an article from SSL Shopper on doing the redirect using Apache's mod_rewrite functionality. 
There's not much to add to what these two articles discuss as they're pretty thorough resources!

I hope that helps! Let me know if you're having issues or have any follow-up questions!

Have a wonderful day!

Trenton

[cheaptubes]

thank you so much Dmitrii - i will look into your suggestions and try them.

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

The way to fix the problem is to know where it's coming from. When you are using browser's network tab, you can preserve log and see where 302s happening. Also you can see those pages in moz and other tools. I clicked around and found that it's happening in product categories and when you click on products. Obviously, since most of the website pages are product pages, you get 45%+ 302 redirects.

Now as how to fix it. Honestly, I'm not gonna be able to tell you, because I don't have your website's code. But find where those redirects are happening (by the way I don't even see any url changes, so maybe this is a problem as well), see how it's setup to work. It can be plugin errors or WP settings.

As for htaccess - I believe https rules should be before any other rules, all "R" should be R=301 and RewriteEngine on should be only one time.

Hope this helps somehow