HTTPS and Secure Socket Layer Certificates

Webzcas

Winter is Coming!
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This past week I bought and installed an SSL Certificate for my oldest site. Anyhow, after configuring the site to use the certificate, sorting out all the 301 redirects and other 'backend stuff', I started to see on Friday evening my serps in google take a nose dive, ala Tom Daly style.

So instead of moping and pulling out what remaining hairs I have left on my head, I decided to turn this into a positive experience. Hence I have started a video diary of the whole experience. Starting with the entry I recorded today for my YouTube channel.

Which you can view below.

I am really interested in getting any feedback from any webmaster that has gone through this process of converting their site to use https. Hopefully this diary of videos I will be putting together will become a good learning resource for webmasters yet to go through what is currently a painful process. :D

 
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A brief update, but I am starting to see my rankings return to where they were, from nowhere. Video to follow soon....

Your first 2 links in your signature are dead btw - error 500.
 
my questions would be why have you gone down the https route? does your site need to be secure or purely from a SERPs perspective

have you noticed any real speed losses in your site as a result of the change re:TLS Handshake?

i did look into it, but the speed issues put me off pursuing going down https route, as again user metrics are probably a way bigger factor than having https
 
my questions would be why have you gone down the https route? does your site need to be secure or purely from a SERPs perspective

Best practice really. Online Casino Reviewer is my oldest site and is my main 'money' site. I have just completely overhauled it, so it made sense to do this now. The positive seo benefits are very very light, but the web is moving towards SSL and also HSTS. So it made sense to do it.

have you noticed any real speed losses in your site as a result of the change re:TLS Handshake?

I have spent quite a considerable amount of time on this, this week actually. One of the reasons Dunover above reported the site down :rolleyes: - The GTMetrix speed test is proving good results. But like anything could be better.

i did look into it, but the speed issues put me off pursuing going down https route, as again user metrics are probably a way bigger factor than having https

Agreed, but all the big sites including google are using https or are considering it. Don't let that put you off.
 
A bit thank you to Webzcas for this thread, very useful as I had considered the SSL approach for a while.

Spent today purchasing and installing a certificate on my new affiliate site. Took a while to understand what the hell I was doing on the technical side but got their in the end! I had to set up a script to redirect all non-secure traffic to the secure version. Also had a 'IP canonization' bug to correct.

Thankfully, the technical support in Malta is first-class when it comes to server issues and managed to get everything done before I leave for the day :thumbsup:
 
Glad it was of help Nicola.

I had to set up a script to redirect all non-secure traffic to the secure version

Yep that is the major PITA, especially images. I use Wordpress on OCR so there are already some decent off the shelf plugins that handle this, however, I still manually checked every page, just in case.
 

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