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
-
301 Question - issue
A while back we had a 'bleed' on one of our sites, which basically meant one of our sites started to leak across pages to another and that site started to rank for the same pages and now we have hundreds of pages ranking for urls that do not exists. It's hard to explain, bare with me. If you were to click on the cached view in Google for the ranked page it would show you the main site, but if you were to click it as usual, then you would be taken to the site but a 404 would show as the intended page was not for that site. We believe we fixed the 'bleed' and have setup 301s for all the affected pages to go to the home page for the site it affected. But these pages have not been removed from Google, which we thought a 301 would do. So we still have hundreds of pages being ranked but are redirected to the home page. Why hasn't these pages been removed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits0 -
301 redirect hops from non-https and www
It's best practice to minimize the amount of 301 redirect hops. Ideally only one redirect hop. It's also best practice to 301 redirect (or at least canonical) your non-https and/or your non-www (or www) to the canonical protocol/subdomain. The simplest (and possibly the most common) way to implement canonical protocol/subdomain redirects is through a load balancer or before your app processes the request. Both of which will just blanket 301 to the canonical domain/protocol regardless if the path exists or not In which case, you could have: Two hops. i.e. hop #1 http://example.com/foo to https://example.com/foo, hop #2 https://example.com/foo to https://example.com/bar 301 to a 404. Let's say https://example.com/dog never existed, but somebody for whatever reason linked to it (maybe a typo). If I request https://www.example.com/dog, the load balancer would 301 to a 404 page. Either scenario above should be fairly rare. However, you can't control how people link to you. Should I care about either above scenario? I could have my app attempt to check if the page exists before forwarding, but that code could be complicated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud0 -
Please help with serp placment question?
We own discount banner printing and we are trying to rank 1 for pvc banners or vinyl banners and cannot understand for example how the below is correct, we did suffer a link penalty years ago but we fixed this and the domain has some good links (more and better quality than the sites above us) and cannot understand how we rank below most of the sites above us? If we type on for example pvc banners we get http://www.bannershop.co.uk/cats/pvc_banners.htm https://www.hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php http://bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/ http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html And if we type in vinyl banners we get http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/banners.aspx http://www.bigvaluebanners.co.uk/ http://vinylbannersprinting.co.uk/ http://www.discountdisplays.co.uk/html/vinyl_banners.html https://www.buildasign.co.uk/banners http://www.monkey-print.com/outdoor banners/budget-outdoor-banners http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Google PR & OSE DA/PA Question
Hey Moz Community, Can anyone explain why a website would have a PR4 Home page and most inner pages PR3 with only a DA12 and PA14 from OSE? The website in question is my Rotary club http://carymacgregorrotary.org. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhiteboardCreations
Patrick0 -
Structured Data Questions
I am showing 2 items with errors. These products have both been removed from the site, and will trigger a 404 Page Not Found. I am still seeing the page URLs in Webmaster Central > Search Appearance > Structured Data. They are shown as items with errors, the errors being that they are missing price too. Should I 301 redirect these on an htaccess file, or should I remove the page url in some other way from Google? Also, I have a site with over 50,000 products and 2,000 category level pages. In Structured Data, there are only 2,848 items. Does it seem like Google is collecting very little data compared to how many urls I have on my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Dealing with non-canonical http vs https?
We're working on a complete rebuild of a client's site. The existing version of the site is in WordPress and I've noticed that the site is accessible via http and https. The new version of the site will have mostly or entirely different URLs. It seems that both http and https versions of a page will resolve, but all of the rel-canonical tags I've seen point to the https version. Sometimes image tags and stylesheets are https, sometimes they aren't. There are both http and https pages in Google's index. Having looked at other community posts about http/https, I've gathered the following: http/https is like two different domains. http and https versions need to be verified in Google Webmaster Tools separately. Set up the preferred domain properly. Rel-canonicals and internal links should have matching protocols. My thought is that we will do a .htaccess that redirects old URLs regardless of the protocol to new pages at one protocol. I would probably let the .css and image files from the current site 404. When we develop and launch the new site, does it make sense for everything to be forced to https? Are there any particular SEO issues that I should be aware of for a scenario like this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
HTTPS moz.org untrusted - invalid cert
https://www.moz.com/ has an invalid cert guys This Connection is Untrusted You have asked Firefox to connect
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
securely to www.moz.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.
Normally, when you try to connect securely,
sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified. What Should I Do? If you usually connect to
this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is
trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue. www.moz.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for moz.com (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain) If you understand what's going on, you
can tell Firefox to start trusting this site's identification.
Even if you trust the site, this error could mean that someone is
tampering with your connection.
Don't add an exception unless
you know there's a good reason why this site doesn't use trusted identification.1 -
Question on starting again after being penalised for bad links
Hi, in a scenario where you have been heavily penalised for bad links but the quality of your site is good, If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start? Any advice or experience with this would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | em_welsby1