SSL Migration Case Study

Earlier we described the steps that dealers should make to migrate to https protocol. Now we would like to share our experience and results. If you ask the question: how to switch from http to https and save the traffic by spending the minimum amount of time and money, our case study will give you answers to this and many other questions.

Why migrate to https?

The main task of the https protocol is to provide the correct encrypted connection. It cannot be listened for by a third-party service, and the data left on the website can’t be used for fraudulent purposes.

https advantages are as follows:

• Your website has more solid look in the visitors’ eyes.
• The search engines rank your site better.
• You get the increase of the website load speed in most frequently used browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, and Opera as they support HTTP/2 protocol through https.

Here are the steps we made to relocate our website to https protocol:

1. Preparation for migrating to https
   

   Before we started the relocation process, we replaced the absolute internal links available on the website with the relative ones. As for remarketing codes and different scripts, we changed their addresses to the relatives and the domain names, but without the http protocol. In case with the media content, the links to images and video files were also replaced with the relative ones without the old protocol.

2. How to set up the website and save the traffic?
   
   • In the robots.txt file we changed the host line by writing a domain name along with https. We updated the sitemap line the same way.
   • Then we added the https version of the website to Google Search Console and uploaded a new XML sitemap. As we used the Disavow Tool we duplicated the data from http to https property.
   • We configured 301 redirects by changing the old http addresses to the new ones with the https protocol. Then we made sure that the images were available at https and checked out all the page types. Thus, we monitored all the pages to be available at https.
   • Our site has several subdomains which also needed their link addresses to be changed. We replaced the links.

   After all the work was done we only had to wait for the reindexation.

3. What are the results?
   We relocated our Autoxloo website to https in December 2016. The results of this relocation are the following:
   • Within the first few days after the move, our website lost the ranking by most of its keywords. The drop was severe, up to 40 positions. Some keywords were not ranked in Google top 100. This tendency lasted for 3 weeks. Then a smooth growth in positions and the return of keywords to TOP 100 began.
   • Some words came into TOP 10 after migration. Most keywords returned their positions, and 10% of them improved the ranking.
   • The traffic volume and the number of leads increased by 5% compared to the period before migration. We expect it to grow more.

Is it necessary to relocate all websites to https?

All websites are recommended to switch to the secure protocol because users’ security is the most important thing the website owners should care about.

Autoxloo offers all dealers despite of their website type, size and location the most comfortable, efforts free and painless migration to the SSL. Take care of your customers and business today not to lose them tomorrow!