From HTTP to HTTPS

[Direct_Ram]

Hi

We have implemented HTTPS to the our website. Do we need to now redirect the whole site to HTTPS in the HTTACCESS file?

Because when you enter the site via a google search or enter the domain directly the site is set to HTTP once we click on a URL on the page it sets it to HTTPS so do we require to redirect from the start?

thanks
E

[taryn_s]

Hi Ram,

Yes, you absolutely should redirect all of your HTTP pages and other resources to the HTTPs version to prevent the situation you describe happening. It's likely Google will see duplicates of each of your pages which will cause ranking issues.

There's a great check-list at the bottom of this blog post by Cyrus Shepard which will take you through everything you need to do.

[RyanPurkey]

Right. If you want the HTTPS from the start you'll need to redirect to it. There's a few nice discussion around how over at Stack Overflow, here's one such example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13977851/htaccess-redirect-to-https-www. The code you use may vary depending on what you want to achieve.

[Direct_Ram]

Thanks guys

Just to confirm would you recommend goign through and altering all links that point to HTTP to HTTPS for example: google+, analytics etc or would the redirect be sufficient and do this automatically?

Also noticed that google analytics and adwords are now blue and not green in tag assistant once the change was made - any ideas?

thanks

R

[RyanPurkey]

That Stack Overflow discussion goes into getting Google Tag Manager up and running. It's best to clean up URLs to get as many as possible pointing to HTTPS.  That way you're not making unnecessary redirection hops with things you can control.  Cheers!