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
-
Website Not Performing after switch to HTTPS
We recently switched our client's website to HTTPS but after the move, we've experienced a huge decrease in rankings (off the map), and traffic. Our metas for the homepage are not being picked up by Google, although it was appearing correctly before the switch. We've implemented all redirects, resubmitted URL to Google, and updated GSC. GSC is also reporting errors in our XML stating there are no URLs to crawl. Has anyone had any issues similar? What do you all recommend? Help greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMRTCHInteractive0 -
How can I fix a SSL that is redirecting 3 times?
I have url that is redirecting three times. How do I fix that? I am using WP and running Really Simple SSL plugin. Is it ok to use the redirect plugin also? See here what the problem is: http://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ redirects to https://thepatrickmullin.com/ through a redirect chain. This hurts your rankings http://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ -->
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pmull
https://www.thepatrickmullin.com/ -->
https://thepatrickmullin.com/ Any help would be greatly appreciated!0 -
Internal Duplicate Content Question...
We are looking for an internal duplicate content checker that is capable of crawling a site that has over 300,000 pages. We have looked over Moz's duplicate content tool and it seems like it is somewhat limited in how deep it crawls. Are there any suggestions on the best "internal" duplicate content checker that crawls deep in a site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tdawson091 -
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Sites in multiple countries using same content question
Hey Moz, I am looking to target international audiences. But I may have duplicate content. For example, I have article 123 on each domain listed below. Will each content rank separately (in US and UK and Canada) because of the domain? The idea is to rank well in several different countries. But should I never have an article duplicated? Should we start from ground up creating articles per country? Some articles may apply to both! I guess this whole duplicate content thing is quite confusing to me. I understand that I can submit to GWT and do geographic location and add rel=alternate tag but will that allow all of them to rank separately? www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.ca Please help and thanks so much! Cole
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Question regarding geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT. However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France). e.g. www.domain.com -> UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TranslateMediaLtd
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France etc Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.0 -
Blog comments - backlinks - question
Hi, I see that many good websites have backlinks from very good blogs/sites which are relative. What I noticed that everyone use their real name or generic name in comments. They do not use the keyword for the name. So later they get backlinks with anchor text of their names... So, my question is this good technique ? Do I have any benefits from these backlinks for my website ? With such a technique, whether it is enough just to leave your real name or may I periodically put the keyword for the name ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek990 -
Making a whole site website SSL (https)
Our IT department wants to make a change to our website and serve all the pages under SSL (https). This will be happening at the same time as a move from classic ASP to ASP.Net so the file extensions for non re-written urls will change (this doesn't equate to many). They will be ensuring everything is 301 redirected correctly. Even with this I can't help being very nervous about the change. We have tens of thousands of links to the website gained over many years, and I understand even with 301'ing them they will lose some of their value. We receive tens of thousands of natural visitors per day. Has anyone done anything like this before, or have any advice on whether it is the right thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0