Moving Site from HTTP to HTTPS

[CommT]

Hello,

Our sites are on https and have been for around a year and a half ago.

The only site we switched from http to https was really young when we did it and so the risk of lost rankings/traffic was minimised because we didn't have much to begin with. However, I have to say, we didn't really notice any difference before or after.

The only issues I have with the https version is that rich snippets don't seem to show. I suspect this will get resolved though as more and more sites move over to secured versions.

Good luck with the switch, Andy has given you all the info you need on that so I won't add anything else!

Best wishes,

Amelia

[GPainter]

Would Agree with you, its a very minor signal e.g optimizing meta tags will work more probably than this compared.  Wouldn't rush into it just because Google says jump, if your on an eCommerce you should already have it anyway.

Still some really great answers here though. Would love to see SSL purchases this month must be a massive spike!

[MickEdwards]

also there is a small overhead with the initial https handshake which can impact time to first byte and page load speed.  Therefore session length and caching play an important part in determining the cost of using https.

[EGOL]

When I go to Amazon and their website says... "Hello EGOL"... I don't see the https.   I only see it when I am into account information.

When I go to ebay and look at the stuff I am bidding on or have purchased I don't see the https.

When I visit MattCutts.com I don't see https.  WTF?

Amazon and ebay and lots of other sites don't have https even when you are logged in and they show your personal stuff.... so I am supposed to get it for my peanut.com domain where nobody logs in and nobody has any information stored?

So, I am not doing anything right now.  I'll wait to see how many people step in poo setting it up and then, after the bugs are discovered and amazon does it... I might be ready.   (I do have https in my shopping cart.)

ADDED:   I just read Barry's post on SearchEngingRoundTable..

Google Change Of Address Tool Does Not Support HTTPS Migration..

That does it for now.

[KeriMorgret]

Thomas, when you have a moment, could you go back and edit your response and remove some of the extra spaces and make the formatting flow a bit better? Thanks!

[CommT]

We did it  as a response to managers above our heads within the business deciding it was a good idea. Had no choice! But, as I said before, it made no real difference, though (again, I said this before) our site was really new (about 3 months old on a new domain) so it's hard to say whether we really lost traffic, because we did not have that much organic traffic on the site at that time.

I think you're wise to wait for the dust to settle so you can learn from others' mistakes

[WilliamKammer]

We discussed this internally yesterday, and came to the same conclusion EGOL did. SEOs are so quick to panic and change everything on the slightest bit of real news. What's the harm in waiting and seeing how things are after the dust settles?

[EGOL]

I think that your managers made a good call at the time, especially for your industry.

I think my employees are glad that I am saying that "this is crap" for now.. .but they agree that we should do it within the next year or so.

[CommT]

We didn't particularly want it at the time, but I'm pleased we have it now (funny how things work out, eh?) I'm also pleased we did it when we did it because, as said before, the site was very new on a new domain so there really wasn't much in the way of organic traffic to lose . I think I'd have had a nervous breakdown if we had to do it now when the site is much more established and I actually have some listings to lose!

Although, I did successfully manage to move it onto a new domain without losing listings in April when we formed the new company so I think I can handle most things But, still, it did give me a few sleepless nights worrying about how I would explain to my CEO why things went wrong! But, they didn't and I honestly believe that if I can move a site from one domain to another and actually gain traffic and rankings then anyone can!

[PaddyDisplays]

If most of your users come from 1 region is there any point having a CDN?  Or is it better (fast) for https?

[LioH]

Hi All,

We've just switched everyting to HTTPS.
We use Cloudflare as we arleady had an account with them.

Our sites are pretty new (http://ezilize.fr & http://ezilize.be) so the organic impact will be extremely limited as we just started. As we're new, we're taking everythig to boost our SEO, even a <1% ranking factor.
Everythnig has been 301 redirected, and we have less than 10 external links (we're live since a couple of weeks).

My question is : "Do I need to change something with MOZ campaign? Do I need to delete + create new ones using https instead of http?"

Thx,
Lio

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Paddy,

Depending on where your servers located in the speedier currently getting out of it but more importantly in my opinion on what that server is capable of doing.

If you use a content delivery network will give you great caching options along with a very fast network plus things like googles SPDY

All of the WAF's I mentioned having SPDY as well.

So you could pick up quite a bit of speed depending on what your current host offers of course in addition to the proximity of your current hosting company & other facters I would test the RUM speed of the end user Pingdom is a great tool for this to decide whether or not the additional cost of using a CDN or WAF is worth it prior to making the change. If most of your visitors are very happy according to the speed apex then you will want to do something like adding that CDN or WAF

On the subject of how close your current hosting company is to your clients and users you can modify this easily using. Sucuri's WAF allows you to pick from more than 100 pops across six hosting companies all over the world to take over as your origin so if you are a customer is in Dallas you can choose to use Server Beach/Peer1 Can take advantage of Google's SPDY combined with a choose exactly which data center you want server origin to originate from including the caching and everything else that would be included in hosting.

I hope this is been of help,

Thomas

I think SSL is here to stay I don't want the cost of SSL certs going up over this.

[Essentia]

By now you may already know that Google have suggested to site owners listed under Webmaster Tools that they list four versions of their site when using HTTPS. So for us who are just initiating this move, we have to list http://redwrappings.com.au http://www.redwrappings.com.au https://redwrappings.com.au and finally https://www.redwrappings.com.au. Then they suggest making https://www.redwrappings.com.au the preferred site.

I have an associated question - we are looking at using the Cloudflare CDN with its associated SSL certificate. Will there be any negative SEO effect using this SSL cert as opposed to our own?

Thx, Graham