Http to https question (SSL)
-
Hi,
I recently made two big changes to a site - www.aerlawgroup.com (not smart, I know). First, I changed from Weebly to Wordpress (WP Engine hosting with CDN + Cloudflare - is that overkill?) and I added SSL (http to https). From a technical perspective, I think I made a better site: (1) blazing fast, (2) mobile responsive, (3) more secure.
I'm seeing the rankings fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the important keywords. I added SSL to my other sites, and saw no rankings change (they actually all went up slightly).
I'm wondering if anyone has had experience going to SSL and can give me feedback on something I might have overlooked. Again, it's strange that all the other sites responded positively, but the one listed above is going in the opposite direction. Maybe there are other problems, and the SSL is just a coincidence. Any feedback would be appreciated.
I followed this guide: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - which helped tremendously (FYI).
-
I'm also a big fan of changing the complete domain to HTTPS. Therefore I'm using HSTS response header to enforce this. The great advantage is that the browsers remember that site as HTTPS and skips any redirect you may have to make from HTTP to HTTPS. So might worth looking at this as well. We are using KeyCDN with force SSL feature enabled.
-
It's a bit overkill, but if you want to get rid of something, you can get rid of wp engine. I have a lot of websites running on cheap $5 hosts + cloudflare and once everything is cached, they are blazing fast.
Regarding the rankings, as Cyrus said, depending on the niche you'll see fluctuations, i have a website where i see movement in the serps every day or every other day.
Website looks nice, clean and professional.
-
Likely a coincidence, or at least highly probably there are other circumstances at play.
If you changed platforms, changed content, links, architecture at all, if there have been any changes in the backlinks, if the competition has made changes (something you can't controll!) if Google has made algorithm changes - even specific to your vertical, then you are bound to see changes in rankings that might be hard to pinpoint or explain.
Attorneys, especially those in certain niches like DUI, are especially tough and prone to fluctuation. Might take some extra investigation on your part.
Regardless, the site looks good and fast. Nice work!
-
Cloudflare is good, particularly with SSL. If it works well (check fetch + render in webmaster tools) then I would keep it.
You shouldn't need W3 Total Cache with WP Engines own caching, so I wouldn't mess around with your site performance any more if it is all working fine. You have good speeds as it is.
-
Would you recommend getting rid of CloudFlare? With 27 requests and a 300kb file size, I just don't think I need it. Especially if it's potentially causing fetch errors.
-
Hi,
Thank you for the detailed response. Yeah, I wondered if a new site + new host (WP Engine) + Cloudflare + SSL all at the same time was just too much.
I use WPEngine, which includes MaxCDN. With that said, WPEngine doesn't allow W3 Total Cache.
Thanks again for the feedback. I appreciate it.
-
Hi,
No, it is not overkill to use a CDN with Cloudflare. For my own site, I used MaxCDN with Cloudflare Railgun with HTTPS. Cloudflare railgun (free with certain hosts) will cache the content that shouldn't be cached, so great for SSL.
Unfortunately, what I found was Cloudflare gave Google fetch errors for certain files, so now I just use Maxcdn plus I like my EV SSL certificate which doesn't work with Cloudflare (unless you have the $200 pm plan).
You may want to check out https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/ as that guide will help optimize your site, although I think WP Engine has it's own caching system.
Looking at your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dzqaUq/https://www.aerlawgroup.com/ it looks very lightweight, with only 27 requests. That is about as good as it gets, especially with your very low page size (300kb). I personally think you will struggle to optimize the site more, as quite frankly... your site speed is excellent. Well done!
Regards
Jonathan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to be included in related questions (People also ask) in Google SERP?
Just wondered if anyone knows how to be included in SERP if it comes to related questions (People also ask). Do you have to fill some requirements or is it featured snippets kind of thing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
Disavow File and SSL Conversion Question
Moz Community, So we have a website that we are moving to SSL. It has been 4 years since we submitted our disavow file to google via GWT. We decided to go through our backlinks and realized that many domains we are disavowing currently (under Since we are moving to SSL I understand Google looks at this as a new site. Therefore, we decided to go through our backlinks and realized that many domains we are disavowing currently are no longer active (after 4 years this is expected). Therefore, is it ok to create a new disavow file with the new profile on GW (ssl version of our site)? Also, is it ok the new GW disavow file doesn't include urls we previously disavowed with the non https version? Some links from the old disavow we found were disavowed but they shouldn't have been. Moreover, we found new links we wanted to disavow as well. Thanks QL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearner0 -
Http vs. https - duplicate content
Hi I have recently come across a new issue on our site, where https & http titles are showing as duplicate. I read https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https however, am wondering as https is now a ranking factor, blocked this can't be a good thing? We aren't in a position to roll out https everywhere, so what would be the best thing to do next? I thought about implementing canonicals? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Technical 301 question
Howdy all, this has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to know the communities ideas on this. We have a .com website which has a little domain authority and is growing steadily. We are a UK business (but have a US office which we will be adapting too soon) We are ranking better within google.com than we do on google.co.uk probably down to our TLD. Is it a wise idea to 301 our .com to .co.uk for en-gb enquiries only? Is there any evidence that this will help improve our position? will all the link juice passed from 301s go to our .co.uk only if we are still applying the use of .com in the US? Many thanks and hope this isn't too complicated! Best wishes,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVFurniture
Chris0 -
Google Places - Advanced Question
Hi All, Ive found multiple threads about previous issues but I haven't found any tailored to my specific question.I know there are a large amount of factors so I wanted to see if any other individuals had ran into this previously. We are currently in a centralized position in a major city. We are discussing moving the main office about 15 miles away into another city, moving us out of the main city where we have been for the past 3 years. The city where we are currently located has a lot more GEO search volume compared to the new city search terms and variants of. If we move will our local rankings drop when someone searches in the city where we were previously? How long would it take for this ranking to fall? Or would we still rank because we are moving a short distance away and have a large amount of citations there? I know we would need to change over all our online directories, on page etc..Any other suggestions on a smooth transition? I know there are many factors that go into this and any past experience, guidance and/or assistance is greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PRKEL0 -
Trouble with https
A new client of mine utilizes a ssl certificate, so his domain starts with https, it seems to be messing up the seo. I just ran a check with site explorer and if I copy and paste the https url into site explorer, it is not found. when I enter http, I get 1 backlink, no facebook likes and no internal links, all which are totally incorrect. Where do I start to sort this out?, htaccess, and what is the best strategy to take? Thanks so much for your assistance! Carin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | handsun0 -
Press Release Question.
We do many Press Releases for many clients and it is recommended to have an about us at the bottom of each Press Release... If we have 200 words at the bottom of each Press Release that we submit to PRWeb should we change them up so they look unique? Will this be considered duplicate content if we leave the bottom section of our PR's identical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate Content/ Indexing Question
I have a real estate Wordpress site that uses an IDX provider to add real estate listings to my site. A new page is created as a new property comes to market and then the page is deleted when the property is sold. I like the functionality of the service but it creates a significant amount of 404's and I'm also concerned about duplicate content because anyone else using the same service here in Las Vegas will have 1000's of the exact same property pages that I do. Any thoughts on this and is there a way that I can have the search engines only index the core 20 pages of my site and ignore future property pages? Your advice is greatly appreciated. See link for example http://www.mylvcondosales.com/mandarin-las-vegas/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyLasVegas0