Http to https question (SSL)

[mrodriguez1440]

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).

[TheWebMastercom]

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

[mrodriguez1440]

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.

[mrodriguez1440]

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.

[TheWebMastercom]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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!

[LinkWheelOldSchool]

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.

[proinity]

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.