Being a small business owner is tough enough. Marketing your stuff on social media and getting a Curl error: 35 (SSL_CONNECT_ERROR) can make it even more difficult. Simple things like posting a link on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter can sometimes even be challenging.

We recently had an issue where posts from our Godaddy Managed WordPress-hosted website weren’t displaying correctly on social media. It would have a link with the domain name but no picture or description. This happens intermittently and Godaddy support doesn’t seem to be able to help.

Using Facebook’s developer debug tool, we were able to determine the cause of the problem. The site was running fine, but there was an issue with the SSL handshake causing the web crawlers to error out.

(the Curl error: 35 (SSL_CONNECT_ERROR)

So what do you do about that?

As we said Godaddy support said that cURL and SSL both were working fine, so they weren’t much help.

We tried turning off all the plugins and that didn’t work.

We tried a different theme and the same thing happened. It was happening on multiple sites too so we figured it had to do with the SSL Godaddy uses.

We even tried removing the domain and restoring it to no avail.

SOLUTION:

The solution we found that works was to switch to the Cloudflare DNS hosting. This service handles the SSL and points back to the Godaddy host for the files. They even cover analytics and protect the site against hackers and DDS attacks. It’s a great product and it seems to fix this common error on social media sharing.

Hopefully this helps you. If you have alternative solutions, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below!