How To Migrate HTTP To HTTPS Without Losing SEO?
A robust security system is a characteristic that intensifies the performance of your website, irrespective of the platform. This security system ensures that all types of sensitive data such as usernames and passwords, credit card information exchanged through your website remain safe. It is very important because the visitors on your site can not afford a sample where the truthfulness of their sensitive information needs to compromise. In the preceding years, websites used Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a way to transfer the required information over their internet. On the other hand, in recent times, HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a safe way of data exchange. This blog helps you to learn the process of migration from HTTP to HTTPs without losing SEO. This blog is a better option for you compared with other resources.
What is Key Difference Between HTTP and HTTPS?
HTTP- It is an application protocol that runs on the top of TCP/IP suite of the protocols that occur to be the base protocols for the Internet. Fundamentally, HTTP is a stateless and connectionless protocol that works on a client-server model. The web browser is the client here and it communicates with the webserver on which the site hosts. The browser uses HTTP that carries forward TCP/IP to communicate to the server and recover web content for the user.
HTTPS: – The protection provided by HTTPS encodes the transferred data with the assistance of an SSL certificate. It means that the data exchanged between the sender and the receiver is available in the form of code if someone attempts to decode it. These two work on a safe socket layer (SSL), to send the information hither and thither, keeping the information encoded and safe.
Migrating your website from HTTP to HTTPS-
HTTPS is gaining huge popularity although it has not considered as a ranking factor for the search engines. However, it does have an influence on the search engine optimization performance of your website, making the migration much more important. Also, migrating your site to HTTPS can affect your website’s SEO. Therefore, migrating your WordPress website from HTTP to HTTPS without affecting the website’s SEO may be a difficult task. Let’s read about how can you do this.
Obtain an SSL Certificate–
The first and important step towards protecting your website with HTTPS is to obtain an SSL certificate. You can obtain your SSL certificate SSLs.com or even Go Daddy. If your web hosting is effective, you can ask them to obtain an SSL certificate for your site connection. You can use let’s encode to get a free SSL certificate. If CDN is in the location for your site, confirm that your CDN supports SSL. MaxCDN is strongly recommended. Once the SSL certificate installs successfully, the URL of your site will begin displaying it.
Change The Default Site URL-
Now, you need to enter your website’s dashboard and change the default URL of your site. Once you do that, never forget to save the changes.
Use Permanent Redirect 301-
The change in your website’s URL will clearly lead to the necessity for redirects. The default URL of your site used to begin with HTTP, now that there is an SSL certificate in the location, all the pages will have to run the default URL with HTTPS and not HTTP.
Go to your website’s. htaccess file and edit it with the help of FTP.
# HTTPS redirect
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (. *) HTTPS://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301, L]
</IfModule>
If you are using FeedBurner, you need to add the following code: –
# HTTPS redirect
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule (. *) HTTPS://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301, L]
</IfModule>
The above code will use the permanent redirect 301 to redirect all HTTP requests to an equal HTTPS Page. You need to save this file once when you complete to add the code. Confirm to check if the changes have applied.
Right Internal & External Links-
Next step, you need to change all your internal links. The manual task can be overpowering for non-technical WordPress website owners. Therefore, they can easily use a “Search and Replace” plugin to get the work completed. This plugin will seek for URLs beginning with HTTP and replace them with HTTPS as direction attained by you. Before you obtain this plugin running, confirm that you take backup of your website’s data.
For external links, you should recheck your website’s browser bar. Still, if it informs you that the website is not safe, it is indicating to the presence of link on the site that begin with HTTP. You can find out such type of links with help of chrome’s developer tools. Make right click anywhere on the page and choose Inspect> Console. It will display the URL that is causing the difficulty.
Still, if your website is showing content warnings, you should check for any broken links with the help of tool. The next step in the procedure are easily about informing Google that your site is now HTTPS and obtain the irregular registered.
You will have to add your HTTPS site to Google search console.
Renew your XML sitemap and submit to Google.
Login to your website’s Google search console and navigate to Crawl>Robots. Txt Tester. Click on the test option and if you obtain a green bar with word allowed that indicates that your site is easily accessible without any blocking.
Thus above process is sufficient for migration procedure from HTTP to HTTPS without losing SEO. Still, if you have any questions, you can take seo agency usa from a professional SEO company. Therefore, SEO professionals are very experts to guide you step by step for any inconvenience.
