An SSL certificate is a truly universally recognized global security standard. A website secured with such a certificate inherently gains better positioning in search results. Moreover, online stores that use the https:// protocol experience significantly fewer abandoned shopping carts. Additionally, their customers and users are much more inclined to return if they know the store has a security certificate, which also increases their trust in its credibility.

Among other advantages of implementing an SSL certificate, we can mention:

• Making it more difficult to steal any passwords or logins from the given site.
• Reassuring the user of the security of the transactions performed on the website, which enhances the shopping attractiveness of a given online store.
• Automatically detecting any possible damage during data transmission on the site.

However, it turns out that an SSL certificate can also, in a short period of time, contribute to a drop in your site’s position in Google search results. There are several proven tricks to avoid this kind of issue.

What to do so that the SSL certificate does not cause a drop in our site’s search engine rankings? Important tips!

Redirects – Precisely configure the domain redirects in Google, as it recognizes the site with the certificate and the one without it as two completely separate services.

Subdomains – Implementing the HTTPS protocol on the main domain does not necessarily mean an automatic implementation of the SSL certificate on all subdomains. Therefore, it’s worth confirming in advance whether the certificate you’re introducing will simultaneously support all potential subdomains, and not just the main domain.

Internal site resources – The HTTPS protocol should be added to all internal resources linked within the site’s code, such as various scripts, images, or videos. Moreover, if there are absolute URLs to other resources in the code, they should be replaced with relative URLs or those that take the new addressing into account.

Canonical tag – If we implement it on our site, it will prevent the duplication of content found there. However, for this to work at all, it must contain an absolute URL. Consequently, introducing the HTTPS protocol must be accompanied by updating it.

External resources – Before adding the SSL certificate, it’s also worth conducting a detailed analysis of the list of external sites that have links leading directly to our website. Next, update all the addresses that can be modified on your own to the new HTTPS form. As for links that you can’t control, you should remember to account for them when setting up redirects.

Advertising and promotion – If, as part of promoting your website online, you use AdWords campaigns or any other form of online advertising, you should ensure in advance that the links lead to the current versions of the pages. If you fail to do this, Google will eventually remove all the “old” page addresses from its index, so correcting them is essential for continuing effective use of online advertising.

Sitemap – You must also remember to update your XML Sitemaps, which contain addresses in the HTTP form, to the new HTTPS version. All URLs listed in the Sitemaps must use the new protocol version. To verify that this has been done correctly, you can use Google Search Console (which also needs to be updated).

Google Analytics – Verification of the new settings must also be carried out in Google Analytics. However, this task may require updating the GA code. To do this, find the service settings tab and correctly replace the default protocol from HTTP to HTTPS.

Page loading speed – It may turn out that implementing the SSL certificate will lengthen your website’s loading time. If this happens, a series of corrective actions should be taken, such as minimizing the number of installed plugins, checking the size of the images on the site, or removing any unnecessary tags from the HTML and JavaScript code. In such a situation, it may also be worth considering implementing HTTP/2, which in most cases allows for accelerating the service.

However, if you have trouble implementing the SSL certificate on your own – seek the help of specialists to guarantee the best possible functioning and proper positioning of your new, secure website.