Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?

[rayvensoft]

Good morning,

As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning.  So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https?  Even simple information pages and blog posts?  Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it?

Anybody know?  Thanks in advance.

[SilverDoor]

Hi,

I'd advise switching your whole site across.

It's not necessary to do so, but with the way things are going, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Since Google have decided that it is important and will have an impact on rankings, there is no harm doing it on every page. They aren't going to penalise you in any way for doing so.

The change is only affecting 1% of all global search terms at the moment so I wouldn't panic yet. However, if they find this to be a very successful way of ranking, it could rapidly be spread across a much higher percentage.

We are in the process of implementing the change ourselves and are going to do it sitewide.

[danatanseo]

For those unaware of the news, here is a link to the Wall Street Journal article:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/google-to-boost-encrypted-websites-in-rankings-1407384244?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_tech

[altecdesign]

the way I read the information from Google is that if you have all your pages "site wide" redirect too SSL they will factor that into rankings.  If you only enable the SSL on sensitive shopping cart pages you will not get credit in Google's eyes.

Its an interesting move, and in general the only "negative" aspect of doing this is site speed. The SSL "handshake" slows down site loading times, but it should be a very small amount.  I'm guessing that in the future google will provide some kind of "reward" for sites that do this... possibly a small badge or emblem on the serp page saying something like "secure site".

[rayvensoft]

Thanks for all the response.  I implemented the switch yesterday, so as of this morning the whole site is for https.  We already had an SSL certificate for our payment area, so luckily it was not a cost issue.  My concern is primarily the slowdown issue as AltecDesigh mentioned (we only have a mid-range server) and any drop in SERP, since essentially from what I have been reading this is like 301'ing to a new domain.

Here are the steps I went through.  Not sure if they are the best option, but there were no step by step instructions yet on google so hopefully this will help people who are planning to implement it themselves.

1) Added the SSL certificate (in case people have not done this yet).
2) Implemented a site wide switch through my .htaccess file using this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

3) Went through the site, page by page with the Google Chrome developers console open.  That help me find any errors.  The most common ones were including images or external files through their "http" address.  Tedious, but easily fixable by simply doing a Replace All on the files and replacing them with a "https".
**4) **Reported the domain change in GWT (which to me seems like an odd thing to have to do)
5) That was it.  It took me one day to implement across our site with about 2000 pages.  If it even helps a bit, that will be a worthwhile use of my time.

I also had to add a plugin to our wordpress blog since for some reason the .htaccess changes were not working for our blog in a subfolder.  I will try to come back and update the results in a few weeks so other mozzers can see if this worked for me, or if they should avoid it.

Thanks again for all the feedback, it helped us make the decision.  In general I actually like this move of Google (unlike many of the others they have done).  Let's see if it makes any difference.