How to Switch Over to HTTPS for Better Security and SEO

On October 2017, Google Chrome will start marking pages with forms and the HTTP heading to be marked as “not secure”. This means that if you are not using an SSL certificate on your site and have any kind of form, Chrome will alert users that your site is not secure when they are filling out your form.

Such warnings could cause less people to fill out your forms, so if you are not using HTTPS, then you may want to consider switching.

This article will discuss how you can switch your site over to HTTPS hosting and how to set up an SSL certificate on your site.

Pros and Cons of Switching to HTTPS

If you’ve been using the standard HTTP protocol, here are some pros and cons of switching to HTTPS.

– Time and Cost – You may have to pay someone to switch hosting or pay for an SSL certificate if your host doesn’t offer free SSL. Migrating can also mean making coding changes to old URL’s, images, etc. and a few other considerations mentioned below.

– Compatibility – Some plugins and apps may not work with HTTPS, so check all of your WordPress plugins and apps to see if they are compatible before you migrate.

– SEO – Sites that implement HTTPS usually get more SEO traffic than sites that don’t and you don’t have to worry about any Google security warnings. You should also 301 redirect all your HTTP links to HTTPS.

– Safety – HTTPS is also safer for your website visitors.

If you’re not sure whether to migrate or not, you can leave your site as is and see what happens and decide to switch if the old HTTP set up hurts your user experience and conversion rates. Once you decide to migrate, here are some steps you can follow.

1. Find a host that offers free SSL

Several SSL providers are now providing free SSL certificates for 90 days, one of the most well known being Let’s Encrypt. While you can sign up and install the certificate yourself, it is a pain to have to remember to renew it every 90 days.

Luckily, several web hosts have already integrated with Let’s Encrypt so that it automatically renews your SSL certificate for you. Setting it up is often as easy as clicking a button in your control panel as well.

Simply search for “web host free SSL” to turn up a list of hosts that offer free SSL with their hosting.

2. Set up your SSL certificate

You may need to set up your SSL certificate if you are not on shared hosting. When you are setting up your SSL certificate, you will have to enter your domain name. Be sure to enter the domain name without the www, even if you are using the www prefix. By entering only the root domain, the SSL will apply to all sub-domains on your site.

3. Switch all internal HTTP URL’s to HTTPS

If you had any links hard coded to HTTP, switch them to HTTPS. These changes only apply to internal links on your site.

If you are using WordPress, then you can try installing a plugin like Really Simple SSL which will attempt to automatically convert your site to HTTPS upon activation.

Otherwise, if you are manually making the switch, you can use a find and replace script to replace all hard coded occurrences of HTTP. You can also use a plugin like Better Search Replace.

4. Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS

Be sure to redirect all your old HTTP links to HTTPS. If you are using WordPress, then a plugin like Easy HTTPS Redirection can make it easy to set up this redirect.

If not, the best way to redirect is to update the server configuration file. Many people use 301 redirects instead by updating their htaccess file and this solution is also shown further down on the page:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4083221/how-to-redirect-all-http-requests-to-https/21798882#21798882

5. Redirecting Social Share Counts

When you switch your site from HTTP to HTTPS, you lose your social share counts. Maintaining social share data can be good for social proof and may also have some impact on SEO.

Social Warfare has a featured called Share Recovery that allows you to redirect social share counts from your old HTTP pages to the new HTTPS pages. However, due to changes in social media API’s, they cannot guarantee that share counts will be preserved for all sites. See this article for more details.

Here is an article you can forward to your web developer if you want to use code to redirect your social share counts:

Preserving Social Share Counts when Migrating to HTTPS

6. Check Site Security

After you’ve switched everything over, check your site to make sure it is properly secured. Here are a couple of tools that you can use:

Check for SSL Errors:

https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/

Check if your site is set up correctly with SSL:

https://www.whynopadlock.com/check.php

To sum it up, switch to HTTPS does require some work, but it can be worthwhile if you want your visitors to be able to go to your site without getting security warnings for forms and can also help with increasing search engine traffic.