Who Here Has Personally Gone From HTTP to HTTPS?

[Ryuzaki]

Something came up recently that has made me think about this topic again. I've got several sites of my own that I regret not starting with HTTPS although no transactions or even data is passed through them other that Adsense style tracking cookings. That's why I opted to not use it. This was before Google made the push.

I then resisted because there were almost universal reports of people losing traffic due to the 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS.

But recently Google confirmed that 301's no longer dampen the flow of page rank like they used to.

Since then I've seen an account here or there of people actually gaining traffic from the switch. I feel like I even saw someone on BuSo say it as well.

What was your personal experience and how long ago was it?

If you made the switch well before the talks of 301's not losing page rank, did at some point you see an inexplicable rise in organic traffic that could be evidence for Google making this switch?

 

[Flex]

I've made the switch on a couple of transaction handling sites, nothing extra noted. Same goes for content based sites. There will be a time when people will need to do it, and it's coming.

 

[ryandiscord]

I did and saw a two week traffic drop. Then after the serps sorted themselves out traffic returned to normal. Someone here mentioned a gain though. I did the change in February on a large ecommerce site which was about the same time John Mueller mentioned that 301s to HTTPS don't lose pagerank. https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

 

[SmokeTree]

Around May 2015, I migrated a couple of custom e-Commerce sites I coded for a client to HTTPS only. One site has over 10,000 products and the other has less than that. Nothing copycat or cookie cutter about the sites, I coded them in Ruby/Rails/JS and friends from scratch.

Prior to the change, HTTPS was used only for authentication/checkout/customer areas, which was pretty much how most people rolled up until the HTTPS only revolution in recent times. One site has been up since 2010 and the other was brought online early 2013. I created all the necessary rewrite/redirect rules on the server side, made sure all variants of the site existed in webmaster tools (they had just changed to search console), set the preferred domain, etc.

For the first month or so, I was seeing rankings for the more competitive keywords fluctuate anywhere from 5-10 positions downward (not upward at that time) then right back up with the HTTPS link in the SERP. By the end of the month, things mostly returned back to normal as far as rankings and we had a few long-tails that had climbed a bit but nothing that gave me any indication that it was because of the HTTPS change. I hear others report they are seeing results very similar to what I have seen.

Based on my own data and what I hear from others, I'd say that the migration to HTTPS isn't likely to have a long-lasting negative effect on rankings. At the same time, I can't personally gauge whether there was a "boost" associated with the migration. If there is, I'm not seeing it or hearing about it. YMMV

I'd definitely recommend the switch, but for reason of keeping the tech up to date. As @Flex mentioned, this change is inevitable.

 

[MightyOwl]

I recently migrated a few of my AdSense / Affiliate sites to SSL using https://letsencrypt.org/ ( it's free and all decent hosts have a direct one-click install in cPanel ) . No ranking changes . The green bar makes the site look important and that's about it .

 

[miketpowell]

We've gone to all HTTPS this year. There are some ground breaking benefits to it that most people aren't even looking at.

 

[Potatoe]

We've gone to all HTTPS this year. There are some ground breaking benefits to it that most people aren't even looking at.

You must know that someone's going to ask for more specifics on those ground breaking benefits

 

[jäger]

We've gone to all HTTPS this year. There are some ground breaking benefits to it that most people aren't even looking at.

I would like to not hear anymore about this. Thanks in advance.

 

[Nebraska]

I was heavily involved in moving a large eCommerce website to HTTPS several months ago. Organic traffic didn't move either direction. Just the nice green color.

 

[miketpowell]

You must know that someone's going to ask for more specifics on those ground breaking benefits

Being able to use push notifications and directly ask the user for permission (process is not as smooth for HTTP). I'd say it won't be long until the guru's start selling courses on it.