Because privacy and security are important to users across the internet, many services have begun to encrypt the connection between a user’s browser and their servers. The use of SSL (or TLS) largely eliminates the likelihood that a “man-in-the-middle” is able to monitor a user’s activities on the web. To this end, WordPress.com is joining the likes of Google and Facebook in encrypting all of the traffic sent across our network. We are currently in the process of forcing many of our services to be accessible through HTTPS exclusively.

It was previously possible to access the WordPress.com/Jetpack JSON API through HTTP only for unauthenticated requests. As part of the SSL transition, all public-api.wordpress.com endpoints are now accessible via HTTPS only. Any requests made to the HTTP version of the URL will now 301 redirect to the HTTPS version.

What does this mean for you?

For the majority of our API consumers, this won’t require any change as you are likely already using the HTTPS URLs with authenticated endpoints. If you are not, now is the time to update your API calls to the secure URLs.

By making this change, we’re helping make the web a more secure place for our users.

As always, If you have any questions about the API, don’t hesitate to comment below or reach out to us via our developer contact form.