How to Migrate from HTTP to HTTPS

Monday, 27 March 2017
Google has not specified the penalty to give more to 301 redirects .. and that's good news!

When you're developing a new shop, but want to move along many of your old web pages, often changing the URLs of those old pages. When live your new shop, but also, for example when switching from your shop to HTTPS, you will need to implement "301 redirects" to avoid problems.

A 301 redirect indicates that a page of permanent location changed. This ensures on the one hand that visitors still go to the old address will be forwarded to the correct page. On the other search engines can therefore understand that an existing page has a new address. Despite careful often referring lost some old pages about 15% of the PageRank. This caused a surge in the results after every major change to the page addresses.

Google HTTPS

A common security measure for websites and webshops is an SSL certificate. SSL certificate ensures that encrypted information is sent from your site to the visitor and that you address begins with "https://". In this way, the information that is sent may not be read, even if someone would halfway tap off the signal.
Google announced in August 2014 that websites using an SSL certificate would get a small boost in the search results. This made Google also boost security of websites besides relevance. And to show safe sites for each query.

However, this created a dilemma for websites and web shops that could not run on HTTPS, or just the pages where personal data were transmitted had run over HTTPS. As in Magento first standard was done by setting up a secure URL. You could choose to transfer your shop on HTTPS, which you accepted that you could lose some of your PageRank and there would be a surge in your position and revenue. Alternatively, you could also choose not to meet the needs of Google and thus accept that you would rank lower in the long term.

Our advice herein was always to take the switch to HTTPS when there are already changes to the URL structure were to arrive. For example, in the development of a new shop or to adjust the categorization within the shop.

Easily migrate to HTTPS

Google recently indicated no PageRank penalty to give more to 301 redirects. This does not mean that you will never lose more positions by referring to other pages. When you refer an optimized page with relevant text to a page about a completely different topic, then the value will flow quickly.

However, when a page is directed to a page with identical content, there would be virtually no swings or loss should be more. Let this is exactly the case for a migration from HTTP to HTTPS! Because there are no changes to the content of the page, therefore, there would be no more loss by switching to HTTPS.
Make the transition to a full HTTPS website, even if no other changes are made to addresses. Obviously, a good preparation is essential in this process; you always want to make this change in accordance with your online marketing agency.

Migrate from HTTP to HTTPS Step by Step

Step 1: Preparation

Check absolute versus relative URLs

Map out whether all internal links on your site are relative URLs. Navigation links, this can often be adjusted at once by means of a setting. The most likely where it does not always go well, are manually placed links to product descriptions, category texts or information pages. Edit each URL to a relative URL. Unlike absolute URLs are relative URLs directly right after the migration. The correct way is: <a href="/website-development"> Website Development </a> instead of the entire URL.

Also check immediately whether all images with relative URLs are in the code. The correct way is: <img src = "image.jpg"> instead of the entire URL.

See also http links in JavaScripts and CSS files.
Excel with inbound links

Create an excel with all incoming links and the corresponding addresses. After https going live then you website owners as much as possible sending an email with the request to modify the URL. All URLs will naturally after migration neatly redirect to the correct URL. Therefore, the link continues to work well, but it you have in any case whatsoever https inbound links.

Prepare in advance a mail that you can send directly after the migration of your shop to all webmasters.
Changing Destination URLs for advertising

Immediately after the switch, all AdWords destination URLs must be converted to https. This includes destination URLs in all other deployed advertising channels such as retargeting, banners, social media and affiliate marketing campaigns.

Data Feeds

Make sure that on the day of migration all data feeds for comparison, affiliates, Google Shopping, and other parties which data feeds are delivered to destination URLs contain https. Caution: do not convert yet that comes after migration.

Redirects HTTP to HTTPS

The easiest way to ensure that all redirects going over https is to set it in the web server. On an Apache server, you'll need to do this for example in the .htaccess file. This is for the search engines is very important in order to maintain the popularity of the pages. A 301 is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

It is therefore wise to adjust the .htaccess (Apache server) so that all URLs automatically go over the https protocol with a 301. That looks like:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
</IfModule>

Please note that when you turn on the redirects on that you do not redirect to the root, but the exact new URL. For example http://subimage.fr/fr/32-sublimation to https://subimage.fr/fr/32-sublimation.

The web server must be compatible with HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), these forces to load the host https. Nowadays, almost every server suitable. An SSL certificate must be installed on the server. This can best be carried out by the hosting party.

Further, the Web server must be compatible with SNI. SNI (Server Name Indication) is an extension of the TLS protocol (Transport Layer Security, rather SSL). This indicates the hostname the client attempting to connect. The SNI extension is supported by all modern browsers, only Android 2.x (default browser) Internet Explorer in Windows XP and Java versions 1.7 are not supported.

Certificates

Talk with your hosting provider what kind of certificate you need:
  • Single domain single scure origin (example.com)
  • Multi-domain (example.com, example.co.uk)
  • Wildcard certificate (a.example.com, b.example.com)

If you have a weaker key certificates (1024 bit), upgrading it to a high level of security with a 2048-bit key.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) Libraries should be updated with the latest version available. At this time, TLS 1.2 is the latest version.

Step 2: Migration

Start request to the migration through the hosting provider to trigger the switch. All preparations can now trigger. So converting the URLs in data feeds, Adwords, retargeting, affiliate campaigns, etc., and accessing all mapped sites that link to the http link. Send them the mail that you've already put in the preparation.

Webmaster Tools

Then get started with Google Webmaster Tools:
  1. Add and verify the new https version of the Webmaster Tools.
  2. Duplicate and upload the robots.txt file for the new https version on your Web server. Edit via robots.txt tester (within Webmaster Tools Crawl under) and check it for errors.
  3. Upload the sitemap with all https URLs. This will help Google a hand for the re-indexing of all pages.
  4. If the new version is online, you can help Google to index it faster. Using Webmaster Tools you can submit the website or individual pages via the tool - Fetch as Google.

Test your site

Working all site functionality yet? Test the filtering, sorting, searching, reviews, pictures, newsletter subscriptions, etc. Also place a test order, even though the check-out already in https.

Traffic monitoring

Keep your traffic well watched. This can be done the following ways:

  1. Analytics should automatically go well. Still, it is wise to monitor your traffic. Do this via Webmaster Tools and (real) Google Analytics.
  2. Also compare https and http in Webmaster Tools with each other. If all is well, fall displays the HTTP version and rise to the https version. It can take weeks or months to all https URLs are replaced and indexed in the Google index.
  3. Monitor indexation. Be the first https URLs already indexed and you maintain the position.

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