Moving to https

[Renford_Nelson]

Hi all and thanks for taking the time to read my question.

We are going to migrate a very small website from http to https, its a roughly 9 page site with 5 of those being product pages.

I figured I would have to set a canonical and permanent 301 redirects for each page.

But our tech guys suggested just doing a binding to https so any traffic hitting our site with a http url would automatically get redirected to the https version.

So if someone land on http://mydomain, it would automatically return https://mydomain

Does this sound correct or would we need to do additional tasks even if we go down the binding route?thanks again for looking.

[RobertJakobson]

Here's the step-by-step right and easy way:

• 1. Sign-up for Google Webmaster Tools and create individual sites for 4 variants of your website:

• http non-www

• http www

• https non-www

• https www

• 2. Set the preferred domain among the above four.

• 3. Add an canonical URL for all pages for either https://www. or https://.., whichever you choose.

• 4. Add 301 redirect from http:// to https:// via htaccess using mod_rewrite.

• 5. Use Google Webmaster Tools "Fetch as Google", under "Crawl" in your http:// sites to confirm that http://.. gets redirected and optionally submit those redirects to be indexed by Google (just to make sure).

• 6. Build and submit a sitemap for your preferred domain site (one of the https://..) via Google Webmaster Tools.

• 7. Optionally, connect your Google Analytics property with your preferred domain site in Google Webmaster Tools.

[KristinaKledzik]

This sounds odd to me - in my experience, if you want to load one page by a server sends you another, that's a redirect. It doesn't matter how the technology works on the server side as long as the initial URL returns a 301 before the server returns a different page.

It's possible that you and your tech guys aren't really talking about different things, you're just coming at it from different angles. Could you ask them to implement the solution they're suggesting, then use http://httpstatus.io/ to test an http:// URL to see what server code it returns? That might be a good way to communicate what you're looking for. The important thing here is to stress that your tech guys can code the server however they want, as long as it has the right output (301 redirects).

And, of course, use canonicals.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I would suggest migrating the whole site, and 301 redirecting all the http pages to the https versions.  Without a proper redirect you risk the possibility of losing any link juice that would be directed at that page.  A canonical should technically cover that, but the hard 301 leaves no room for robot interpretation.

Also, why leave the http version when you have a secure version available?

[Essential-Pest]

We have been considering switching to https as well, what are the pros and cons of doing this that you have heard on your end?

Make sure you have proper redirects as well.