Http-To-Https Migration Checklist

General Web Hosting
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If you're the one who hasn't migrated to HTTPS yet and going to do it in the nearest future, here's a checklist of the most important things to keep in mind.

1. Update internal links to pages on your site – all of them must start with https://

2. Make sure that all external links lead to the updated pages of your site with HTTPS.

3. Check all occurrences of the IMG/CSS/JS tags in your code – they must start with https://.

4. Make sure that you have specified 301 redirects. These are the redirects that are used when moving to HTTPS.

5. Make sure that you have protected the whole site, not just one of its elements (login page, order goods page, etc.).

6. Check the canonical links. All links with rel = canonical should lead to your new HTTPS pages.

7. Make sure that your CDN-provider supports HTTPS (today almost all CDN-providers have such support).

8. Set up HTTPS in Google Search Console. A site with HTTPS must be added as New Property in Search Console. Do not forget to reload the Disavow file.

9. Open the indexing of your HTTPS pages if it was closed earlier.

10. Send an updated sitemap.xml with HTTPS URLs to Search Console so that Google can better index your site.

11. Keep track of the traffic of your new site. Initially, the traffic will drop while the transition to HTTPS, but later it will normalize and enter new, higher positions.

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Read more about HTTP-to-HTTPS migration in our blog.

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Guys, are we missing anything?

Join in in the comments to create a complete MIGRATION CHECKLIST!

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Here's a shortcut to how to switch to HTTPS for CS-Cart.

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What are the benefits of moving the site completely to HTTPS? Won't the speed of the website get affected?

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What are the benefits of moving the site completely to HTTPS? Won't the speed of the website get affected?

Hi!

Yes, it will, but not significantly. Configured correctly, the difference will be neglectable.

But. Chasing these milliseconds can cost you way much more.

-Browsers warn users entering HTTP sites with red alerts.

-Facebook will not allow using the social login on HTTP pages.

-Google considers HTTPS as a ranking signal (two similar pages with and without HTTPS will rank differently)

-Users are well informed about security importance which makes HTTPS a trust factor, especially for the ecommerce website.

If you want to compete for the clients, you should migrate, otherwise, you will fall behind. That's what the Big Guns say...

But don't you worry, migrating is not deadly. Yes, it's complicated, but can even be performed with zero cost.

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What are the benefits of moving the site completely to HTTPS? Won't the speed of the website get affected?


Also, using HTTPS allow using HTTP/2 protocol :)

HTTP/2 protocol is already significantly optimized compared to HTTP 1.1, and so a simple HTTP/2 implementation (enabling) can improve the performance of web servers. And disabling the extra tweaks that were used to speed up HTTP 1.1 will help take full advantage of HTTP/2.


Read more hereP.S. If you want, I can write some article about HTTP/2 :)