Your July 2017 Search Engine Bytes Digest
 by Kristi Hagen

Why Did Our Traffic Plunge After Switching to HTTPS?

  • Help! We just switched our site from http to https and our traffic immediately plunged. Is it possible we may have bungled this operation causing the steep drop in traffic?

    Could you please take a look and tell us if you see anything we might be overlooking.

Answer:

If done correctly, a site that migrates to https experiences only positive results. However, the operation is a bit tricky and everything has to be done just right.

We checked, by doing a site search — site:yourdomain.com — and found your site is indexed as both http and https. That's a problem that negatively affects rankings which negatively impacts your traffic. Currently Google is seeing your site as two distinct URLs with 100% duplicate content — considered very bad SEO practice.

To correct the problem, and successfully migrate your entire site to https, you should start by reviewing our guidelines for migrating your site to https.

Then, once you’re sure everything is working, log into your Google Search Console and...

  1. re-verify your site as a new property using the HTTPS protocol,
  2. then submit a new HTTPS XML Site map within that new property.

If you have internal links that refer to the old http URL format within your site, be sure to also update them to HTTPS. And, be on the alert for site slowing redirect chains that may have occurred as a result of your previous attempt at switching over (example: from http://sitename to https://sitename to http://www.sitename to https://www.sitename).SEN article end


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