- How to Prepare a Website for Moving to HTTPS
- Setting Up HTTPS on Hosting
- Setting Up the .htaccess File and Notifying Search Engines
Websites that run on HTTPS are better perceived and ranked higher by search engines. If a couple of years ago moving a website to HTTPS was a recommendation, today it is already a mandatory item in the checklist for optimizing a web resource.
There is nothing complicated or impossible about this. To make sure everything goes smoothly, it is recommended to coordinate actions with the technical support specialists of the hosting company whose services you use.
How to Prepare a Website for Moving to HTTPS
We have already talked about what an SSL certificate is and why you should move your website to the HTTPS protocol in a previous publication. Now let’s go over how it is done.
To transfer a site without losing your position, you first need to perform a number of preparatory tasks:
- Replace all absolute links in internal linking with relative ones. This will help avoid unnecessary problems with the availability of website elements and repeated indexing by search engine crawlers after the move.
- Fix links to media content. If the files are located on your website, change the URLs to relative ones, as in the previous step. If they are hosted on an external portal, change the links only if that content is available via the HTTPS protocol.
- Check the settings for connecting external scripts. If absolute links are used, they need to be changed by specifying relative paths.
These three steps are the most labor-intensive, as they take a lot of time to implement. But to move a website from HTTP to HTTPS, they must be completed without fail.
Setting Up HTTPS on Hosting
After the preparatory stage, it’s time to move on to the main work. To transfer the site to https, do the following:
- Select and purchase an SSL certificate. They come in different types, so base your choice on your needs and financial capabilities:
- Regular. Used for one domain. Issued within 5–10 minutes, as only the ownership of the domain by the person requesting the certificate is verified.
- Extended Validation. After purchasing this certificate, a green padlock and the organization’s name appear in the address bar. For most users, this is a guarantee of the website’s reliability. To obtain this certificate, you must confirm domain access rights, provide documents on the company’s state registration. Additionally, the company name in the Whois data is verified, test calls are made to the main company phone numbers, and so on.
- Wildcard. Used for subdomains.
- With IDN support. Intended for websites with Cyrillic domains.
- Install the SSL certificate on the server. Usually, this procedure takes a couple of minutes since it is performed in the user-friendly control panel provided by the hosting company. If you encounter difficulties, contact technical support or hire an experienced programmer to move the website to HTTPS without losing traffic.
- Check the accessibility of the web resource. Make sure it opens via both URLs: with http and https at the beginning of the address bar. Then configure it so that when the HTTP version is opened, the user is automatically redirected to the secure HTTPS protocol.
If the website is unavailable via one of the addresses, or redirection does not occur, it means errors were made during configuration. Or there may be issues on the hosting provider’s side. There is only one recommendation here: find the cause and fix it.
By the way, for everyone using the services of the hosting company Cityhost, it is enough to simply purchase an SSL certificate — and the web resource will immediately be available via HTTPS. You will only need to slightly adjust the site engine and change addresses in MySQL.
Setting Up the .htaccess File and Notifying Search Engines
Finally, you need to perform a few simple actions:
- Set up a 301 redirect. To save time, configure it in the .htaccess file using the mod_rewrite module. Or contact your hosting company’s technical support for assistance.
- Find and fix errors. The transition of a site from http to https is always accompanied by some nuances. Therefore, after the move, check everything: the availability of each page, the correct operation of links and media files. If necessary — fix them.
- Notify search engines about the move to HTTPS. This is necessary to minimize traffic loss. You can notify search engines in Google Search Console.
Now you know how to set up the HTTPS protocol. Whether to do it yourself or entrust it to specialists — it’s up to you. By understanding the difference between HTTP and HTTPS and correctly setting up the data transfer protocol, you increase the chances that the website will receive a solid plus from search engines. And with the right approach to promotion, it will be much easier to take high positions in search results.
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