Studies show that cybercrime is expected to cost $6 trillion globally by 2021. A data breach is sure to reduce your brand value, apart from a series of lawsuits and regulatory actions by government authorities.
According to research by Security Intelligence, the average global cost of a data breach is around $3.92 million.
In this article, we will discuss one of the most in-demand security aspects of naming SSL certificates and how you can move your site to HTTPS without affecting your online presence.
Ideally, to protect their website, businesses should purchase inexpensive SSL certificates to encrypt the communication that takes place between the visitor and the web server.
Hence, it is an essential netherlands phone number library requirement to have an SSL certificate and add SSL Monitoring to check its validity to keep your website safe from cyber attacks.
Does migrating to HTTPS provide SEO benefits?
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In 2014, Google announced that it would prefer to have a secure Internet. To this end, they announced that HTTPS websites would receive a boost in search engine rankings .
The number of HTTPS sites is steadily increasing, but there's still a long way to go. Google says it would make HTTPS a "soft signal," meaning that if all factors are equal, HTTPS websites will rank higher.
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Points to consider when migrating to HTTPS
Doing some activities before the migration.
Before you migrate your site to the HTTPS platform, you should crawl the original website and visualize the site structure. You should understand the underlying technologies that are found throughout the website.
You should make a list of all the programs, namely APIs, external scripts, payment gateways, etc., that you need to consider when migrating to the HTTPS platform.
Plan your activities
Before you undertake migration activities, you should perform a URL mapping exercise. This is especially critical for large websites with hundreds of pages.
You can use a specialized website like Screaming Frog to list all the URLs on your website. It will help you migrate the entire site without any errors.
It is equally crucial to have a proper redirection plan in place. You need to make sure that redirects are done one by one to avoid bulk actions being performed on irrelevant pages.
Change the default URL
Once you have installed the SSL certificate, you need to make sure that WordPress and the site address are changed to the HTTPS address.
To ensure this, you need to visit the WordPress dashboard and go to the Settings tab. There you will find the General option.
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You need to confirm that both the WordPress address and the site address are entered as HTTPS URLs. Once you save the changes, your work is done. After that, go to Settings >> SSL to check the updated settings to SSL.
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After that, check your HTTP URL in the browser and make sure it redirects to the HTTPS version.
Setting up 301 redirects
This is a critical activity in the entire migration process. The search engine has to index the migrated site and there must be some semblance of a relationship between the old web page and the redirected page.
The best way is to use WordPress plugin or do it from the server. 301 redirects will inform the search engine that the old page has moved to a new address.
Update in Google Analytics
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To update your site URL in Google Analytics, you need to log in to your admin, go to Property Settings, and change the dropdown to HTTPS under the "Default URL" settings.
Internal links in blogs
As a best practice, bloggers will include internal links in their blogs. There may be instances of this on your product portfolio pages as well. It is essential to move all HTTP links to the HTTPS platform.
The more internal links there are, the higher the risk of missing one of them. It could lead to a mixed content error. You can use one of several plugins that can help you convert backlinks to the HTTPS version easily.
Once you feel like you've moved all of your HTTP URLs to HTTPS, it's helpful to formally check if there are still any URLs that need your attention.
It would be helpful if you performed a website audit to uncover such errors. You should ensure that all rel=canonical and hreflang attributes point only to the appropriate HTTPS pages.
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If your website has mixed content, there will be an exclamation mark in the address bar next to the HTTPS website. You can use the Developer Tools and select the Console tab. Here you can get the URLs that are creating this issue.
Inform Search Console about the change.
You must inform the search engine about the change. You must visit Google Search Console and include the HTTPS version of the site.
To do this, go to the Google Search Console site >> click on ‘Add Property’. After that, you need to add a sitemap for the HTTPS URL.
It is suggested that you set the preferred version for the HTTPS site once you have completed the entire installation and taken care of any other activities deemed necessary.
Additionally, it would be helpful to make changes to the website analytics software you are using.
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Avoid any tracking issues
Once you have migrated your entire HTTP site to the HTTPS platform, you will need to make sure that search engines crawl your website correctly. This is why you need to generate an XML sitemap once again. It needs to be resubmitted to Google.
Also, check if your robots.txt file is blocking your HTTPS pages. HTTPS pages should also be checked for no-index tags.
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Now, backlinks
Your SEO team must have done a lot of backlinking to improve the SEO value. It becomes necessary to change the HTTPS backlinks to HTTPS.
Even though 301 redirects may be in place, you may still lose some link content. The webmaster must also download the disavow file in Google Search Console from the HTTP version and upload it to the HTTPS version.
Migrate social share counts
Once you migrate to HTTPS, you might also want to migrate your social sharing counts. There is specific software that can allow you to do this.
While migrating counters can also be easy, not all social engagement counts may be migrated. This is where software like Shareholic can help you find the missing shares, add them up, and display the total.
Conclusion
Search engines like Google have been promoting HTTPS sites over HTTP. It becomes necessary for a business to purchase cheap SSL certificates to move to the HTTPS platform.
But the webmaster must undertake a number of activities to ensure a smooth transition. We have discussed them in this article and we hope you find them useful.
