HTTPS during or after redesign

[Trent.Warner]

Performing a website redesign and with that we are going to be deindexing a lot of pages and make big changes to the site architecture.

With all of these big changes happening with the redesign, should we include the change to https during the redesign or about 4-6 months after? If we do it after we will have time to diagnose any shortcomings of the redesign.

Thanks!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Keep in mind that you are facing two main changes, site-structure and _domain migratio_n, and on my experience that can be like a play with fire. I had to face the same process and it turned into a nightmare for some apparently small errors.

So my advice follows the tick-tock model, first, take care of the site structure and then you can proceed to the https migration, why I prefer work on site-structure first, mainly because there are fewer risks of losing Domain-Authority, I mean if you will rearrange your tags and categories, probably will not hurt you. In fact, if you perform a good optimization will help you a lot to improve your ranking. Why?

1 Category archives are landing pages
Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. Those archives should be the first result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. Thus, they should also provide the best user experience. The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. In a shop, your products might change, making your categories more important to optimize. Otherwise, you’d be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.
2 Categories prevent individual pages from competing
If you sell boxers and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term ‘boxers’. You should optimize them for their specific brand and model, and link them all to the ‘boxers’ category page. That way the category page can rank for ‘boxer’, while the product page can rank for more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.

Also, I will suggest you my favorite tool for creating an outstanding site structure **Dyno Mapper **in my opinion is by far the best way to get the job done, also will help you to check where are your weak points.

Talking about your domain migration. The redirect will become a crucial task, I will suggest strongly you screaming-frog, (probably you already have it if not give it a try)mostly to get a deep analysis of your internal links.

Also, keep in mind to start to build quality links to your new domain in other to build and strong DA so when you move your site will take you less time to recover your ranks and traffic

**Hope this info will help you **

Regards

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi Trent,

I agree with Roman in that I would definitely do one before the other - much easier to manage and troubleshoot. If it was me, however, I'd do the https migration first. Why? Because there will be less moving parts. You only have to worry about the protocol change and can put aside renamed or dropped URLs until a later date.

[seoman10]

Definitely don't do them at the same time (Google themselves advise that).  From personal experience I would recommend doing any major changes/restructure first, waiting a bit, then implementing HTTPS

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Completly agree

[Roman-Delcarmen]

In Summary. I prefer to work on the site structure first, probably because is one my main skills and I have been investing a lot of time and money on that. Donna Duncan suggests you make https migration first, mainly because is a less complicated process and she is right. Anyway, the main idea behind is the same. The best way to perform the project is one step at a time.

KISS "Keep it simple, stupid"

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Trent,

Did of the awesome responses to your question help? What did you decide to do? We'd love to hear from you!

Christy