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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.

Thanks Cyrus and Max,

Very good answer and I am going to work as per your suggestions

You are right! Which is why I dont want to compromise on usability. Thanks for your response

Thanks for your response, but the images are possibly as optimized as they could be. I use ImageOptim for Mac to optimize them, they are all jpegs (stripped from all metadata) and enabled for (mild) lossy to WebP on supported browsers.

Do you feel there might be anything else that I could do?

Hi,

We all know that Google doesnt like slow loading pages, fair enough! However, for one of my websites, user interactivity is key to its success. Now each of my pages are fairly large sized (ranges in the order or 1.8 to 2.5 MB) because it has a lot of pictures, css and at times some Java script elements.

However, I have tried to ensure that the code is optimized - for example html minified and compressed, caching enables, images optimized and served through CDN, etc. In spite of high page size, my GTMetrix PageSpeed score is 93+ for most pages.

However, the number of requests served is 100+ and page loading time is 4.5s + as per GTMetrix and Pingdom.

My question is - should this matter from an SEO perspective. Is google likely to penalize me for high loading time even though I am serving highly optimized pages? I really dont want to cut down on the user interactiveness of my website unless I have to from an SEO perspective.

Please suggest. Here is my homepage, just as to give you an idea of what i am talking about:

www.dealwithautism.com