Http to https for large ecommerce - our steps taken (any others recommended?)
-
**Here is the message from our technical team for the http to https migration; are there any other http to https migration steps recommended? **
Http to https migration steps (for this large ecommerce site):
We implemented HTTPS (HTTP over TLS) protocol today (5/4/2017).
- Applied a patch to ensure that HTTPS pages did not have NoIndex, NoFollow and tested before and after .
- Added new IIS HTTPS Redirect to enforce HTTPS from HTTP and changed others, including the WWW redirect
- Changed HTTPS only for Cookies as required as per new PCI vulnerabilities
- Changed the Basepage HTML template to use Relative Paths or Absolute URLs with HTTPS only (to prevent mixed content)
- Created and ran a SQL Script to cleanup 16 tables from HTTP to HTTPS (about 20,000 of them, including internal URL links, site settings, etc)
- Ran Google Sitemap Generator to create new sitemaps with HTTPS
- Added new HTTPS instance of the site into Webmaster Tools, then added verification code to master page, verified and then submitted the sitemaps to Search Console (QUESTION: will historical data in Google Console/ WMT be preserved for https?)
**Follow up steps for http to https migration for large ecommerce: **
- From this point forward, to avoid “mixed content”, the Marketing team must use either Relative Paths or Absolute Paths with HTTPS only in any customization (i.e. Basepage) or any new link, such as created in Content Management (i.e. Long Description). Any mixed content will make the website look not secure to customers and search engine spiders – so it is very important to be disciplined and diligent about this.
- Contact Salesforce to change the protocol to HTTPS only. Meanwhile, to prevent mixed content, we put in a temporary custom javascript change as workaround – but this should not be permanent especially as to the next upgrade will remove it – so we need Saleforce to make a change ASAP.
- We did not change Blog site (on sub domain), but we should even though it is only a Content site because it will not be signaled as Secure. This means we need to have someone make the changes to WordPress to enforce HTTPS and then change any links.
In terms of impact to page ranking due to Google’s treatment of HTTPS over HTTP and due to some impact to page speed – we will need to monitor closely to see how indexing, organic traffic and page ranking goes and take any additional actions as necessary.
-
You can try the service of Salesforce with the help of Axis consulting. I have tested it on my site.
-
Aleyda Solis has a pretty solid http to https checklist: http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/search-engine-optimization/http-https-migration-checklist-google-docs/
-
It looks like you followed a pretty good plan, the only thing I would recommend at this point would be to make all of your 301 redirects are 1 to 1. What I mean is, go over your 301 redirects to remove redirect chains, so you will update all of your old redirects that are pointing directly to the new https pages instead of chaining those redirects.
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
-
Ecommerce Preferred URL Structure for Printing Website
Hello Mozers! We are adding an ecommerce functionality to our existing website.
Technical SEO | | CheapyPP
Our company offers a wide range of commercial printing and mail services. We have done a pretty good job over the years in building content both in terms of our print offerings and blog section highlighting those offerings. We have finally bit the bullet and have decided to add end-to end ecommerce functionality. Users will be able to price, pay, upload and order thru our website. My question to the community becomes which sub folder do we use?
The ecommerce functionality is a third part software and needs to sit in a sub folder and we can't seem to find a good fit. Most of our content pages for print items are something like this www.website/printing/ - pillar page examples of url structure for sub pages www.website/printing/flyer-printing/
www.website/printing/booklet-printing/
www.website/printing/door-hangers/
www.website/printing/business-cards/ Options would be order-printing/ or prints/ So we we thinking /orders/ would be the best but not certain and wanted some feedback from the community. If we did go this route the url structure would be: order/business-cards this would be the default econ page order/business-cards/full-uv-coaing-both-sides individual product page What are your thoughts? CH0 -
Landing pages showing up as HTTPS when we haven't made the switch
Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Which Sitemap to keep - Http or https (or both)
Hi, Just finished upgrading my site to the ssl version (like so many other webmasters now that it may be a ranking factor). FIxed all links, CDN links are now secure, etc and 301 Redirected all pages from http to https. Changed property in Google Analytics from http to https and added https version in Webmaster Tools. So far, so good. Now the question is should I add the https version of the sitemap in the new HTTPS site in webmasters or retain the existing http one? Ideally switching over completely to https version by adding a new sitemap would make more sense as the http version of the sitemap would anyways now be re-directed to HTTPS. But the last thing i can is to get penalized for duplicate content. Could you please suggest as I am still a rookie in this department. If I should add the https sitemap version in the new site, should i delete the old http one or no harm retaining it.
Technical SEO | | ashishb010 -
How do I find which pages are being deindexed on a large site?
Is there an easy way or any way to get a list of all deindexed pages? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
ECommerce Problem with canonicol , rel next , rel prev
Hi I was wondering if anyone willing to share your experience on implementing pagination and canonical when it comes to multiple sort options . Lets look at an example I have a site example.com ( i share the ownership with the rest of the world on that one 😉 ) and I sell stuff on the site example.com/for-sale/stuff1 example.com/for-sale/stuff2 example.com/for-sale/stuff3 etc I allow users to sort it by date_added, price, a-z, z-a, umph-value, and so on . So now we have example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=price example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=a-z example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=z-a example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=umph-value etc example.com/for-sale/stuff1 **has the same result as **example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added ( that is the default sort option ) similarly for stuff2, stuff3 and so on. I cant 301 these because these are relevant for users who come in to buy from the site. I can add a view all page and rel canonical to that but let us assume its not technically possible for the site and there are tens of thousands of items in each of the for-sale pages. So I split it up in to pages of x numbers and let us assume we have 50 pages to sort through. example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=2 to ...page=50 example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=price&page=2 to ...page=50 example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=a-z&page=2 to ...page=50 example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=z-a&page=2 to ...page=50 example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=umph-value&page=2 to ...page=50 etc This is where the shit hits the fan. So now if I want to avoid duplicate issue and when it comes to page 30 of stuff1 sorted by date do I add rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1 rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29 or rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29 or rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1 rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=29 or rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=30 rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29 or rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=30 rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=29 None of this feels right to me . I am thinking of using GWT to ask G-bot not to crawl any of the sort parameters ( date_added, price, a-z, z-a, umph-value, and so on ) and use rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=30 rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31 rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29 My doubts about this is that , will the link value that goes in to the pages with parameters be consolidated when I choose to ignore them via URL Parameters in GWT ? what do you guys think ?
Technical SEO | | Saijo.George0 -
Proper method of consolidating https to http?
A client has an application area of the site (a directory) that has a form and needs to be secured with ssl. The vast majority of the site is static, and does not need to be secured. We have experienced situations where a visitor navigates the site as https which then throws security errors. We want to keep static visitors on http; (and crawlers) and only have visits to the secure area display as ssl. How is this best accomplished? Our developer wants to add a rule to the global configuration file in php that uses a 301 redirect to ensure static pages are accessed as http, and the secure directory is accessed as https. Is the the proper protocol? Are there any SEO considerations we should make? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | seagreen0 -
Duplicate content and http and https
Within my Moz crawl report, I have a ton of duplicate content caused by identical pages due to identical pages of http and https URL's. For example: http://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations https://www.bigcompany.com/accomodations The strange thing is that 99% of these URL's are not sensitive in nature and do not require any security features. No credit card information, booking, or carts. The web developer cannot explain where these extra URL's came from or provide any further information. Advice or suggestions are welcome! How do I solve this issue? THANKS MOZZERS
Technical SEO | | hawkvt10 -
Redirecting one ecommerce site to another
Hi I'm planning to redirect one large ecommerce site to another. Here's how I was thinking of doing it: crawl both sites with Xenu and export urls to a CSV match urls where possible, redirecting pages from site A to relevant ones in site B all others will be redirected to site B's home page Now, I'm dealing with thousands of URLs here, so any way to make it easier would be great. Could this mean just redirecting all of Site A's pages to Site B's homepage would be worth it? Or does redirecting relevant pages where possible seem the best idea? Thanks guys!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0