Really Simple SSL is a plugin that is used and installed on a number of sites that have a valid SSL cert to make the site load over HTTPS. But the plugin does not need to be used if the site database already has had a search-replace run from HTTP to HTTPS. If you have used WP-CLI then you can very easily run a search and replace in the sites database before baking a site database backup. wp db export wp search-replace ‘https://sitedomain.com’ ‘https:/sitedomain.com’ –recurse-objects –skip-columns=user_email,guid –all-tables wp option update home ‘https://sitedomain.com’ wp option update siteurl ‘https://sitedomain.com’ wp rewrite flush