Pro's & contra's: http vs https

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi there,

We are planning to take the step and go from http to https. The main reason to do this, is to mean trustfull to our clients. And of course the rumours that it would be better  for ranking (in the future).

We have a large e-commerce site. A part of this site ia already HTTPS.

I've read a lot of info about pro's and contra's, also this MOZ article: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl
But i want to know some experience from others who already done this. What did you encountered when changing to HTTPS, did you had ranking drops, or loss of links etc?

I want to make a list form pro's and contra's and things we have to do in advance.

Thanx, Leonie

[GPainter]

I'm going to give my opinion more than a list of pros and cons, most people who switch over tend to see a drop in traffic and if you don't ensure you get it all right it can be a nightmare so make sure you've got your plan ready.

Are you sure most "clients" know what https is? Most people outside our world have no idea what it is combine with the fact that the so called ranking boost has yet to be well documented it can be fairly certain its tiny.

Now it is possible that your clients know what it is and will see it and go to your site but in most cases I suspect like the ranking boost other factors would play a bigger role. My advice is to really make sure you have all the bases covered for your transfer. Also wanted to point out in the future it may be a bigger factor.

As for advice on people who have already done it oodles of info here on Moz here are a few -

http://moz.com/community/q/http-to-https-transition-large-drop-in-search-traffic

http://moz.com/community/q/https-sitewide-move-has-resulted-in-huge-rankings-drop

http://moz.com/community/q/authority-site-drastic-ranking-drop-after-google-https-switch-please-help

Obviously people tend to come here for problems more than a shout out for how great it is so don't take that as a massive negative and all of the above is my opinion I'm sure some others will give other opinions and I don't want you to be put off just to be aware that there is a lot to cover in a switch over.

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi Pixelbypixel, thanx for your reply.

Right now i'm making a plan for the switch, i'm not in a rush, so i really want to make it all clear before we go, or maybe decide not to..

I don't think most of our clients know what's secure and what isn't.  But we want the opportunity to comunicate about this with our clients, something we don't have right now (only when the order something)

The ranking factor, what i read about it, is not a big thing at this moment, but indeed, in the future and can be a bigger one, so that's also a good reason to go.

Thanx for the linked articles!

Grtz, Leonie

[max.favilli]

I did it a month and half ago for a couple of websites.

Transition was smooth. I had to buy more ssl certificates than I thought for the many domains serving js css and so on... But was not a big hassle.

Just after moving from http to https I didn't notice any ranking change, and to have a good level of accurancy I monitor the same keywords with both moz ranktracker, proranktracker and semrush.

But in fact google is slowly recognizing the move few urls at time, each day you will notice some google serp start serving https url in place of http ones.

After a month we had a big jump in ranking, around +30% more keywords in the top 100 and a general increase in ranking for all the keywords already in top 10, top 30 and top 50.

But I have no idea if it's connected with the shift to https since we also constantly do many other things, get backlinks, improve on-page, etc...

At least it didn't seem to penalize the websites.

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi Max, Thansk, and good to read that you didn't lost ranking. that's my concern and also the backlinking. although you should say with a redirect all the external links i can't control will redirect to https.

We have 2 different ssl certificates now, we are looking for what we need and if we have the right ones.

If i've finished the plan and list i'll think i'll publish it here

Grtz, Leonie

[max.favilli]

In case you choose the most expensive EV certificates as we did, for whatever is not directly visible, like the cdn serving js, css and images you can just use cheap 8 $/€ certificates.

One thing I forgot, if your server support SNI, don't use it.

We did initially, but soon found out some price engines could not read feeds, moz crawler could not crawl, and everyone on XP+IE was left out. So we disabled it.

[Leonie-Kramer]

We have expensive certificates now for the payed section, i think we'll use the same

i'll ask about the server support SNI, not sure about that, thanx

[Leonie-Kramer]

Hi, did you encountered problems with other tools, like Google Analytics and or Tagmanager, Comscore?

Thanx, Leonie

[max.favilli]

We don't use Comscore. Analytics transparently kept tracking everything without any change. We don't use Tagmanager url matching tracking, but unless you have not defined rules which include the url protocol it should not need any attention either.