Strategy After Switching To HTTPS

[BorisD]

So we made a big mistake with our website last month.  Without thinking things through, our entire website was switched to using a SSL certificate and https urls on all pages of the site.  I know it is recommended that SSL is only used on sensitive pages, but we have a lead form on all pages.

Of course Google is taking some time to adjust to all of our urls changing.  A week later we lost all of our Google search rankings.  It has now been about 3 weeks and our site is showing some signs of recovery, but obviously we'd like a quicker recovery.

We have done proper 301 redirects throughout the site, but unfortunately our CMS has been a little buggy creating some other problems to fix along the way.

So my main question is, how can we speed up the process?  I do understand that we stand to lose 5-10% value of our old links due to the redirects.  Is there anything else we should be doing to recover quicker though?

Also, at this point, would it make any sense to switch back to http urls?  Or would that just delay things further?

Thanks!

[BorisD]

Thanks for the advice John.

This is very sensitive contact info due to the nature of our niche.  I do agree that a more simplified lead form on all pages with the extended info on a secure page would be best, but that decision is beyond my control.

Besides, if we were to make that change now, wouldn't it just delay the recovery since all urls would change again?

So it seems like we're at a point that we should be trying to make things work as is.  It is definitely not the ideal setup, but I think we should still be able to recover rankings with this setup.

[john4math]

Is it really necessary to have everything on https?  What kind of information are you collecting on this lead form?  Most people won't bat an eye about you collecting things like name and e-mail address on a non-secure connection, but it would depend on your customers and industry.  For the visits you're getting now, are a higher percentage submitting the lead form because the pages are secure?  If not, I'd flip the URLs back.  https is slower and the browser won't be able to cache everything, so it makes the user suffer on every page load.

A few other thoughts (it's impossible to say without seeing your site), but having a lead form on every page may be overkill.  You could just link to the form (and then have the form be secure), or you might find success collecting just the e-mail address on all of your pages, and when you collect it, have that go to a secure lead form.  Then you'll have a chance to e-mail market to those who abandon the form.  Something to think about and maybe A/B test.

[jonny512379]

I am new to this site, but i would have done the same of a 301 redirect.

However can you not use both https and http? and then drop one once the search engines are listing both? (im not sure if they will see this as duplicate content or not though, if not just run with both http and https)

not sure if you know this or not but, within your HTML links you can use just "//www.domain.com" as appose to "http://www.domain.com". the links will then work on both http and https

Hope this helps, or someone better will come along