How does switching to HTTPS effect Google Analytics?

[EcommerceSite]

We are looking at making our site HTTPS. We have been using the same Google Analytics account for years and I like having the historical data. All of our pages will be the same, we are just going to redirect from the http to https. Does anything need to be done with Google Analytics? What about other addons such as Optimizely, Crazy Egg, or Share this?

[alecfwilson]

I'm not a netsec expert or a technical SEO expert, but I'm running SEO for my company and have been looking into this for a while now. The tips I can give you are: add rel="canonical" tags to all the http:// versions of your site pointing to the https:// version. Once you get an SSL certificate, make sure to claim all 4 variations of your URL (http://, http://www., https://, https://www.) in webmaster tools and designate which is canonical (this will just make sure the Googlebot knows which is canonical, you'll still want to add the tag to your site pages). Finally, make sure that if you do decide to switch to HTTPS:// (which I highly recommend - some people, myself included, now instinctively use https:// over http:// and if someone points a link at https:// when you aren't using it, Chrome will display a yellow warning interstitial and a red X over the https:// in the address bar), get an SHA-2 certificate, rather than SHA-1, as Google is sunsetting it in the next year. To the comment on page load speed - Https:// slows page load down, but generally not by a substantial amount (also, there are plenty of other ways to address page load time that can offset the hit, and if you've already done all that, the page load hit won't hurt you, since you're in better shape than everyone else). Also, while Google's incorporation of https:// as a signal so far has not seemed to impact results much, it's a near certainty that, based on Google's current behavior, it will become less of a signal and more of a necessity, and as more websites adopt it, the less the slight page load hit will matter. Websites are essentially required to adopt it sometime in their lifecycle, as growth makes security much more of a concern.

Further reading on SHA-1 and SHA-2:

https://konklone.com/post/why-google-is-hurrying-the-web-to-kill-sha-1

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/09/gradually-sunsetting-sha-1.html

[bjs2010]

We know that:

1. Site Speed is a Google ranking signal
2. https is now a ranking signal also
   2a) https slows down a site
3. Is it worth going https?

[GoogleDowner]

Yeah Microsoft, for some reason, likes to make things a little more complex than it needs to be. Here are a couple of links I found that might help:

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpredirect

http://forums.iis.net/t/1190228.aspx?Specific+url+301+redirection

[EcommerceSite]

We are using an IIS 7.5 server so I am looking into the best way to do 301 redirects in that. Seems like it would be much easier on a Linux based system.

[GoogleDowner]

Pay particular attention to load speed. HTTPS encrypts everything and sends it to the client browser where it is then decrypted. If certain pages are loading much slower or if you are using the same images/resources on multiple pages you will want to look at caching various resources.

As Highland mentioned, you'll want to make sure the code is using relative URLs and not hard coded "http" URLs because that will not only impact load time but it may give the visitor an undesirable experience if the site is all messed up. If you are on linux make sure that your .htaccess file does a 301 from http requests to https for obvious reasons.

I hope that helps!

[EcommerceSite]

I am using HTTP Watch right now and that seems to give a pretty good list of all my HTTP requests. Any other things to look for? I have been researching as much as I can find and want to make sure I get this all right on the first run.

[Highland]

The main thing you'll want to make sure is that all your JavaScript libraries and images are loading from HTTPS and not HTTP. If you don't, the browser may not load those resources or may show your site as not secured. The default Analytics code will do this for you, but make sure your other libraries are doing so. A great tool for finding any you've missed is Firebug, a Firefox addon. You open it up, load your website and on the Net tab you can see the URL of every resource loaded and even break them down by type (image, JS, etc).

Analytics itself is not affected by HTTPS. Your metrics will continue to load just fine.