Redirecting traffic to https
-
Hey!
i was wondering, should i force all traffic to https address? i know that overall a better secured website will rank better since it earns more trust from users which means less bounce rate and the list of benefits is endless..
but should i FORCE ALL traffic to a https? or maybe only force a http to https? or not at all? -
WOW.. i never even thought about it.. i made sure to make changes in google analytics to track HTTPS only. anything else i should do for a better more accurate data?
-
Yes, you should do it to avoid loss of attribution and many more advantages of HTTPS over Http, as Logan says below.
-
Hi Sharon,
Your site should be entirely one or the other - and since it sounds like you've already got an SSL, I'd go with HTTPS. If you have traffic bouncing back and forth between HTTP and HTTPS, you're resetting the session in Google Analytics when someone clicks from an HTTPS page to a HTTP page. This creates a ton of dirty data and lost attribution.
-
all above has been done already. it just a matter of if i should or not. but i guess i should
-
Hi Sharon. The basic steps are as follows:
- Purchase an SSL certificate.
- Perform a full back-up of your site in case you need to revert back.
- Configure any hard internal links within your website, from HTTP to HTTPS. This show green lock.
- Redirect any external links you control to HTTPS, such as directory listings.
- Update htaccess applications, such as Apache Web Server, LiteSpeed, NGinx Config and your internet services manager function (such as Windows Web Server), to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
- Implement 301 redirects on a page-by-page basis.
- Update any links you use in marketing automation tools, such as email links.
- Set up an HTTPS site in Google Search Console and Google Analytics. This is very important too.
I think you don't have any problems whith this steps.
-
Personally, I am redirecting and forcing all users to use https. Https isn't going anywhere and http has no benefits over https, so trying to support both and not doing redirects is just not worth the effort. Keep it simple and just force all users to use https.
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
-
Ecommerce replatforming and redirects - how much traffic will I lose?
Hey there,I'm looking to hear your experiences in regards to replatforming an ecommerce store and SEO impacts.My company is analyzing the impacts of switching from Magento Entreprise to Shopify Plus. Some background info : 900k sessions / month 52% of sessions coming from SEO Multilingual store : half of traffic is French, half is English 945 domains linking to us, according to search console Competitive industry (retail) Moving to Shopify would force us to do two things: Redirect all category pages, brand pages and product pages. Shopify forces a specific URL structure for these pages that is different from our current one. Redirect the English section of the site to a subdomain (https://en.example.com/...). Have multiple stores on Shopify can't be done on the same domain. I'm especially afraid of the impact of moving the English section to a subdomain. I feel it would lose most of the domain authority - most backlinks go to the website root so very few will be redirected to the subdomain.Even if we spend a lot of time doing redirections, do you think the traffic will significantly suffer? Do you have stats to share on a similar migration you would have done, or other insights?Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cheebee1540 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Why is this url redirecting to our site?
I was doing an audit on our site and searching for duplicate content using some different terms from each of our pages. I came across the following result: www.sswug.org/url/32639 redirects to our website. Is that normal? There are hundreds of these url's in google all with the exact same description. I thought it was odd. Any ideas and what is the consequence of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
90% Traffic Drop...
Hey Moz Community Our team has been racking our collective brains about a 90% drop in traffic a niche client of ours has seen. The traffic drop occurred September 20th. The site averages 300-400 unique visits a month (very targeted & niche) & dropped to 30-40 uvm. The domain is on an exact match but other then that I can't see anything that would be deserving of such a significant drop in traffic. Our campaign had been performing very well & we were seeing steady gains in traffic & ranking over the long term until September 20th. I'm curious if the exact match update would have such a big impact months after it was released (July/July if I remember correctly). I also didn't think it could be such a big issue because that domain has been used by us for a couple years. Is the Exact Domain Match such a big deal? eJGe3Vw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hendersondavidp0 -
URL rewrite traffic drop
Hello, A while ago (Sep. 19 2013) we had a new url structure upgrade for products pages within our website (with all the needed 301 redirects in place,internal links & sitemaps updates), but our new urls lost the serps of the old ones and with that we experienced a big traffic drop (and since September I can't see any sign of recovery).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silviu
Here are just 3 examples of old and coresponding new urls: http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Mexico-phone-cards-182.html http://www.nobelcom.com/es/phone-cards/calling-Mexico-from-United-States-1-182.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/es/Mexico-tarjetas-telefonicas-182.html http://www.nobelcom.com/phone-cards/calling-Angola-Cell-from-Canada-55-407.html
http://www.nobelcom.com/Angola-Cell-phone-cards/from-Canada-55-407.html We followed every seo/usability rule and have no clue why this happened. Any ideea? Cheers,
S.0 -
How to get traffic from a particular Geographical region?
Our company is based out of India and has a web site with .in domain ; however our target customers are from North America and Australia.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TPS2013
The problem is we get as high as 70% of organic traffic from India.
This 70% traffic from India has little use to us. Possibly because we have ”.in “ domain the Google local search is active.
How to reverse this situation; I mean we are looking for more traffic from across the globe except India.
Any suggestions ? P.S. Changing domain from .in to .com is not an option as its the part of our brand advertised for last 7 years1 -
Redirects 301
Hello guys, I have a doubt. If I reedirect a url with a pagerank of 2 to a new URL, will I loose the PR? My problem is that I have a long url in one page wich is not effective to target a keyword that Im persuing. Im climbing in Google, however I want to 1º place and I dont think that with this long URL I will make it. Advices? Cheers! Pedro M Pereira
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Redirects/Forwarding
I have two niche e-commerce sites. One is a PR3 with 3K pages indexed, the other is PR0 with 5K pages indexed. Each site has a blog that has been updated regularly. They both rank well for some fairly competitive keywords and some good links pointing to them. I also have a main site that is PR3. I am thinking of closing down the sites because they are not generating enough revenue, here are my questions: What is the best way to get the most SEO value from these sites? Do I just do a redirect to the main site? Should I keep the sites and use canonical URLs to the main site? Should I keep the domain as a wordpress blog and point links to the main site? What should I do with the blogs? They are on sub-domains, neither has pagerank. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0