Moving Main Site from HTTP to HTTPS: Seeking Quick Items to Consider
-
Hey Mozzers!
We're going to be moving are main company site from http://whiteboardcreations.com > https://whiteboardcreations.com and wanted to get some of your quick tips for items we need to consider. We are working on a new web redesign now and keeping in WordPress. A couple facts for your info... We have read a lot about it, but wanted to get some quick tips we need to take into account from your points of view.1. March 2010 domain age
2. Ranks very well locally for our targeted keywords around web design, WordPress, SEO, social media, blog writing, web maintenance
3. Not many of our competitors, especially the SEO competitors, have moved to HTTPS
4. Site is hosted at WP Engine
5. Going to be purchasing a Domain Validated SSL... Is there any advantage to an Extended Validated SSL in Google's eye/mind?
6. Should we expect rank decrease or increase?
7. Anything else we should expect or prepare for from your experiences?Thank you!
Patrick -
Hey! Yes, we made the switch to SSL and everything went smooth. We set up our 301 redirects and submitted to Google right away. No real loss in traffic and our rankings for the 100+ keywords we monitor either remained the same or increased a little over the first couple months. So, that was pleasant to see and experience.
The real test is when we finish and launch the new design, however, we will be working to keep our URL structure the same, but will be adding many more pages to the site focused on more educational/SEO friendly content. Not really caring if searchers stumble across it in their browsing, but moreso that Google indexes the content for our targeted keywords those pages are designed to capture and rank for (inner landing pages).
As long as we're keeping our authoritative pages un-drastically changed, the URL remains the same and the content is about the same, we shouldn't experience much loss in rankings of traffic. If anything, we should see new keywords ranking very well in a short amount of time and our traffic increasing. We'll see come end of 2015, into 2016!
-
Hi Patrick,
did you do the move to https and what were your results?
We did it and lost 50% traffic. I am wondering if it is just us or many others. I have another few cases were the same thing happened and just trying to get more real world feedback. what happened with you guys?
-
I have been postponing the switch on my Wordpress site anticipating grief!
Did you use the WP Enging "sandbox" to build the new site? I'm probably going to use my offline test box (WAMP) since my host doesn't provide a test area.
Best,
-
Andy, great tip on the WP image URLs!! Honestly, that never crossed our mind and will be sifting through to find them and update them all.
I really appreciate the feedback on the rank increase. I would enjoy seeing that for some of the other keywords we see lingering on the top of Page 2... hopefully see those get a little push to Page 1.
We installed the DV SSL yesterday and working through the redirects. We should be finished tomorrow and have all testing completed and verified by end of the week.
All in all, a great new experience for an older domain with some good authority built up. Thanks again!
- Patrick
-
Thanks, Chris! Yes, we are working through the force redirects as the SSL just went through yesterday. A great learning experience and hopefully will have it all resolved soon. Working closely with WP Engine tech guys has been a breath of fresh air too. - Patrick
-
Thanks for your input, Patrick! I actually referenced your post for another client, so I'm glad it is applicable to a HTTPS update as well.
-
Hey Patrick not sure if this is an issue or not but I notice if I enter http and your urls, your site serves the http version. Clicking on any menu item goes to https, but I would think the http should be re-directed to https?
-
Hi Patrick
I answered a similar question of things to consider when moving a site. You can read that here.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Hi Patrick,
First of all, visit Google and follow their guide. This will provide you with everything you need to know and there are even more very good considerations here.
Check everything and then check it again. Make sure with Wordpress that images reference https, not http, as this is a common issue. I have also seen the same with how Google Fonts are referenced.
Going to be purchasing a Domain Validated SSL... Is there any advantage to an Extended Validated SSL in Google's eye/mind?
No, nothing in doing this.
Should we expect rank decrease or increase?
You should expect an increase, but there is absolutely no guarantee of this, and if so, by how much.
When the move is complete, check your pages that show (if any) a warning triangle as this denotes a page issue. You find this in the developer console in Chrome (Inspect Element --> Console). This will tell you where issues lie.
Finally, make sure you set your site to https://www.site.com from http://www.site.com
-Andy
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
-
Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance". I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources. I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank. Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic. Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity? I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | DavidCapital0 -
Dublicate Content: Almost samt site on different domains
Hi, I own a couple of casting websites, which I'm at the moment launching "local" copies of all over the world. When I launch my website in a new country, the content is basically allways the same, except the language sometimes changes country for country. The domains will vary, so the sitename would be site.es for Spain, site.sg for Singapore, site.dk for Denmark and so. The websites will also feature diffent jobs (castings) and diffent profiles on the search.pages and so, BUT the more static pages are the same content (About us, The concept, Faq, Create user and so). So my Questions are: Is this something that is bad for Google SEO? The sites are atm NOT linking to each other with language-flags or anything - Should I do this? Basically to tell google that
Algorithm Updates | | KasperGJ
the business behind all these sites are somewhat big. Is there a way to inform Google on, that these sites should NOT be treated as dublicate content (Canonical tag wont do, since I want the "same" content to be listet on the locally Google sites). Hope there is some experts here which can help. /Kasper0 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site. The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details: The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site. Questions: Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any? Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source? Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301? Would you 301 if this was your site? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
How do I code SEO for a secondary site without impacting the main site?
We have a secondary site for our online magazine, how do I code the SEO so I don't steal links from the main site?
Algorithm Updates | | gacwebteam0 -
Does Bing Support same sitemap for full site, mobile, and images?
We have 1 sitemap for our desktop site, mobile site, and images. This works for Google, but I'm not sure if it's supported by Bing or if they require separate sitemaps. Anyone know?
Algorithm Updates | | YairSpolter0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
Ranking well for main key terms but site traffic has dropped sharply?
Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim
Algorithm Updates | | TimHolmes0