HTTPS during or after redesign
-
Performing a website redesign and with that we are going to be deindexing a lot of pages and make big changes to the site architecture.
With all of these big changes happening with the redesign, should we include the change to https during the redesign or about 4-6 months after? If we do it after we will have time to diagnose any shortcomings of the redesign.
Thanks!
-
Hi Trent,
Did of the awesome responses to your question help? What did you decide to do? We'd love to hear from you!
Christy
-
In Summary. I prefer to work on the site structure first, probably because is one my main skills and I have been investing a lot of time and money on that. Donna Duncan suggests you make https migration first, mainly because is a less complicated process and she is right. Anyway, the main idea behind is the same. The best way to perform the project is one step at a time.
KISS "Keep it simple, stupid"
-
Completly agree
-
Definitely don't do them at the same time (Google themselves advise that). From personal experience I would recommend doing any major changes/restructure first, waiting a bit, then implementing HTTPS
-
Hi Trent,
I agree with Roman in that I would definitely do one before the other - much easier to manage and troubleshoot. If it was me, however, I'd do the https migration first. Why? Because there will be less moving parts. You only have to worry about the protocol change and can put aside renamed or dropped URLs until a later date.
-
Keep in mind that you are facing two main changes, site-structure and _domain migratio_n, and on my experience that can be like a play with fire. I had to face the same process and it turned into a nightmare for some apparently small errors.
So my advice follows the tick-tock model, first, take care of the site structure and then you can proceed to the https migration, why I prefer work on site-structure first, mainly because there are fewer risks of losing Domain-Authority, I mean if you will rearrange your tags and categories, probably will not hurt you. In fact, if you perform a good optimization will help you a lot to improve your ranking. Why?
1 Category archives are landing pages
Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. Those archives should be the first result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. Thus, they should also provide the best user experience. The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. In a shop, your products might change, making your categories more important to optimize. Otherwise, you’d be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.
2 Categories prevent individual pages from competing
If you sell boxers and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term ‘boxers’. You should optimize them for their specific brand and model, and link them all to the ‘boxers’ category page. That way the category page can rank for ‘boxer’, while the product page can rank for more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.Also, I will suggest you my favorite tool for creating an outstanding site structure **Dyno Mapper **in my opinion is by far the best way to get the job done, also will help you to check where are your weak points.
Talking about your domain migration. The redirect will become a crucial task, I will suggest strongly you screaming-frog, (probably you already have it if not give it a try)mostly to get a deep analysis of your internal links.
Also, keep in mind to start to build quality links to your new domain in other to build and strong DA so when you move your site will take you less time to recover your ranks and traffic
**Hope this info will help you **
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Redesign Performance
Hi, I am looking for a bit of advice if possible. In October 2018 we did a site redesign for a website that we had acquired (www.drainageonline.co.uk) but we have lost SO much organic traffic since Oct (-40/50% each month). I have amended any crawl errors including broken redirects ensuring all 301's that we put in place are working correctly, ensured 404 pages working OK, implemented canonical onto all pages along with other bits but we don't really seem to be seeing any improvements in our organic traffic. Can anyone offer any advice on the above? Thanks, Lea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAP_Digital_Marketing0 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
HTTPS Google Search Console Verification
Hi we have clients http version of our site verified in our search console but for some reason the https version is not verified, do you usually have to install another HTML tag to do this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
How to Evaluate Original Domain Authority vs. Recent 'HTTPS' Duplicate for Potential Domain Migration?
Hello Everyone, So our site has used ‘http’ for the domain since the start. Everything has been set up for this structure and Google is only indexing these pages. Just recently a second version was created on ‘httpS’. We know having both up is the worst case scenario but now that both are up is it worth just switching over or would the original domain authority warrant just keeping it on ‘http’ and redirecting the ‘httpS’ version? Assuming speed and other elements wouldn’t be an issue and it's done correctly. Our thought was if we could do this quickly it would be easier to just redirect the ‘httpS’ version but was not sure if the Pros of ‘httpS’ would be worth the resources. Any help or insight would be appreciated. Please let us know if there are any further details we could provide that might help. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thank you in advance for the help. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R1 -
Http and https protocols being indexed for e-commerce website
Hi team, Our new e-commerce website has launched and I've noticed both http and https protocols are being indexed. www.mountainjade.co.nz Our old website was http with only the necessary pages running https (cart, checkout etc). No https pages were indexed and you couldn't access a https page if you manually typed it into the browser. We outrank our competition by a mile, so I'm treading carefully here and don't want to undo the progress we made on the old site, so I have a few questions: 1. How exactly do we remove one protocol from the index? We are running on Drupal. We tried a hard redirect from https to http and excluded the relevant pages (cart, login etc from the redirect), but found that you could still access https pages if you we're in the cart (https) and then pressed back on the browser button for example. At that point you could browse the entire site on https. 2. Is the safer option to emulate what we had in place on the old website e.g http with only the necessary pages being https, rather than making the switch to sitewide https? I've been struggling with this one, so any help would be much appreciated. Jake S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobsheehan0 -
SIte Redesign - Disaster for Organic Traffic
A client just redesigned their site and launched it around May 30. The organic traffic has had a MAJOR drop and has not returned yet. All of the old pages have been 301 redirected to the new pages. Any thoughts on what could be causing this to www.brickhousesecurity.com? In Google Webmaster Tools, before the redesign we were receiving about 300,000 impressions and 10-12,000 clicks. Now the impressions are only 100,000 with half as many clicks. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0