Fundamental HTTP to HTTPS Redirect Question

[ruislip18]

Hi All

I'm planning a http to https migration for a site with over 500 pages. The site content and structure will be staying the same, this is simply a https migration.

Can I just confirm the answer to this fundamental question?

From my reading, I do not need to create 301 redirect for each and every page, but can add a single generic redirect so that all http references are redirected to https. Can I just double check this would suffice to preserve existing google rankings?

Many Thanks

[seanginnaw]

Hi there!

You're absolutely correct, you would just need a domain-level server redirect to take all http URLs to their https equivalent.

Best practice is to ensure you've also got the non-www. version of the website covered in that same redirect too, to avoid any chains. You'll see what I mean if you run your domain through this > https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/

Depending on what stack you're using, here are the 2 guides. One for htaccess and one for IIS:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10489895/http-to-https-through-htaccess
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaushal/2013/05/22/http-to-https-redirects-on-iis-7-x-and-higher/

You shouldn't need to, but just to be on the safe side, I would also add canonical tags to the http pages, pointing to their https equivalent prior to putting the server level redirect in place. This is to ensure that you won't be causing yourself issues if the redirect fails for any reason. Details here:

• https://searchengineland.com/https-setup-causing-seo-issues-254236

Once you've got your redirection planned in, make sure you set up a Google Search Console account for the https version to ensure there are no crawl issues and to check that the http version of the site stops receiving traffic.

That should just about cover it!

Hope it all goes well,

Sean

[ruislip18]

Hi Sean

Thank you so much, that is brilliant much appreciated.

I'm new to this forum, just to double check I've ticked the thumbs up and also "good answer", I think that show the appreciation that you can on this forum?

[seanginnaw]

Awesome, thank you so much!

[ruislip18]

Hi Sean / Others

Can I just add one last question to this post?

I'm not certain about the canonical tags. Although I don't need to add redirects for everypage, do I need to add a canonical tag to each page?

Is there a way of doing this for all pages?