Http to https question (SSL)
-
Hi,
I recently made two big changes to a site - www.aerlawgroup.com (not smart, I know). First, I changed from Weebly to Wordpress (WP Engine hosting with CDN + Cloudflare - is that overkill?) and I added SSL (http to https). From a technical perspective, I think I made a better site: (1) blazing fast, (2) mobile responsive, (3) more secure.
I'm seeing the rankings fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the important keywords. I added SSL to my other sites, and saw no rankings change (they actually all went up slightly).
I'm wondering if anyone has had experience going to SSL and can give me feedback on something I might have overlooked. Again, it's strange that all the other sites responded positively, but the one listed above is going in the opposite direction. Maybe there are other problems, and the SSL is just a coincidence. Any feedback would be appreciated.
I followed this guide: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - which helped tremendously (FYI).
-
I'm also a big fan of changing the complete domain to HTTPS. Therefore I'm using HSTS response header to enforce this. The great advantage is that the browsers remember that site as HTTPS and skips any redirect you may have to make from HTTP to HTTPS. So might worth looking at this as well. We are using KeyCDN with force SSL feature enabled.
-
It's a bit overkill, but if you want to get rid of something, you can get rid of wp engine. I have a lot of websites running on cheap $5 hosts + cloudflare and once everything is cached, they are blazing fast.
Regarding the rankings, as Cyrus said, depending on the niche you'll see fluctuations, i have a website where i see movement in the serps every day or every other day.
Website looks nice, clean and professional.
-
Likely a coincidence, or at least highly probably there are other circumstances at play.
If you changed platforms, changed content, links, architecture at all, if there have been any changes in the backlinks, if the competition has made changes (something you can't controll!) if Google has made algorithm changes - even specific to your vertical, then you are bound to see changes in rankings that might be hard to pinpoint or explain.
Attorneys, especially those in certain niches like DUI, are especially tough and prone to fluctuation. Might take some extra investigation on your part.
Regardless, the site looks good and fast. Nice work!
-
Cloudflare is good, particularly with SSL. If it works well (check fetch + render in webmaster tools) then I would keep it.
You shouldn't need W3 Total Cache with WP Engines own caching, so I wouldn't mess around with your site performance any more if it is all working fine. You have good speeds as it is.
-
Would you recommend getting rid of CloudFlare? With 27 requests and a 300kb file size, I just don't think I need it. Especially if it's potentially causing fetch errors.
-
Hi,
Thank you for the detailed response. Yeah, I wondered if a new site + new host (WP Engine) + Cloudflare + SSL all at the same time was just too much.
I use WPEngine, which includes MaxCDN. With that said, WPEngine doesn't allow W3 Total Cache.
Thanks again for the feedback. I appreciate it.
-
Hi,
No, it is not overkill to use a CDN with Cloudflare. For my own site, I used MaxCDN with Cloudflare Railgun with HTTPS. Cloudflare railgun (free with certain hosts) will cache the content that shouldn't be cached, so great for SSL.
Unfortunately, what I found was Cloudflare gave Google fetch errors for certain files, so now I just use Maxcdn plus I like my EV SSL certificate which doesn't work with Cloudflare (unless you have the $200 pm plan).
You may want to check out https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/ as that guide will help optimize your site, although I think WP Engine has it's own caching system.
Looking at your site: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dzqaUq/https://www.aerlawgroup.com/ it looks very lightweight, with only 27 requests. That is about as good as it gets, especially with your very low page size (300kb). I personally think you will struggle to optimize the site more, as quite frankly... your site speed is excellent. Well done!
Regards
Jonathan
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
-
How to answer questions when there no questions for my keyword
Hello, Let's say I want to rank on "Alsace bike tour" whatever tool I use Moz keyword explorer, google suggest , keyword.io, answer the public ... there are not questions... so... what do I need to answer ? I imagine that for google there are some questions more relevant than others ? Should I answer do I need to bring my own bike or where will I go... ? and will google give me "points " for answering those questions even though people don't have questions... For the keyword title tag, it is easy, people ask the character limit, title tag generator and so on but for may keywords like that ones I am targeting people have NO Questions ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
XML Sitemap Question!
Hi All, I know that the sitemaps.xml URL must be findable but what about the sitemaps/pageinstructions.xml URL? Can we safely noindex the sitemaps/pageinstructions.xml URL? Thanks! Yael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Question about structuring @id schema tags
We are using JSON-LD to apply schema. My colleague had question about applying @id tags in the schema parent lists: While implementing schema, we've included @id as a parameter to both the "list" child of "ListItem" of a "BreadcrumbList" - on the same schema, we've added an @id parameter to mainContentOfPage and both @id parameters are set to the pages URL. Having this @id in both places is giving schema checker results that have the child elements of "mainContentOfPage" appearing under the "list" item. Questions: is this good or bad? Where should @id be used? What should @id be set to? Thanks for the insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Href lang and multilingual question
Greetings Moz-Hive mind! I'm hoping you can help me on the internationalisation conundrum below; We currently have a website with three distinct 'locales' US, SEA and UK we automatically redirect customers using IP recognition to a locale which matches, we also determine their currency based on IP. The issue we currently have is a lot of duplicate content and no use of href lang or rel=canonical tags etc... My proposed structure would be to create a locale based directory for the three locales we offer. / - being US and most other Worldwide /uk - being UK /as - being Hong Kong and other Asian territories. How would you suggest we set up the href lang tags for these? Because technically there are going to be multiple language possibilities within. Our main customers are English only if this helps. Also as a secondary question, how should I set up the Google Search Console settings for each of these directories? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashley-Jacada0 -
A few questions on Google's Structured Data Markup Helper...
I'm trying to go through my site and add microdata with the help of Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. I have a few questions that I have not been able to find an answer for. Here is the URL I am referring to: http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-chicago My company is a bar/club, with only 4 out of 13 locations serving food. Would you mark this up as a local business or a restaurant? It asks for "URL" above the ratings. Is this supposed to be the URL that ratings are on like Yelp or something? Or is it the URL for the page? Either way, neither of those URLs are on the page so I can't select them. If it is for Yelp should I link to it? How do I add reviews? Do they have to be on the page? If I make a group of days for Day of the Week for Opening hours, such as Mon-Thu, will that work out? I have events on this page. However, when I tried to do the markup for just the event it told me to use itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event" on the body tag of the page. That is just a small part of the page, I'm not sure why I would put the event tag on the whole body? Any other tips would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | howlusa0 -
Http, https and link juice
I'm working on a site that is built on DNN. For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them). All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN. Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky? I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage. Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
This is kind of a trick question, but if you could only do ONE thing to improve your search ranking what would you do?
This is kind of a trick question, but if you could only do ONE thing to improve your search ranking what would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JHSpecialty0 -
Question about copying content
Hi there, I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this? Here a few ideas I was thinking of: I was thinking they put canonical tags on all pages where they have copied our content? They copy the content but leave all anchor text in place? Please let me know your thoughts. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780