Migrating Your Website To HTTPS? All-Inclusive HTTPS Migration Checklist For SEO

So you are switching to HTTPS for your website? That was a wise decision! It is imperative that you design a safe online environment for your customers and website users. When it comes to moving your website to HTTPS, there are a lot of crucial elements that must be taken into account. This article’s checklist covers all the essential elements and will assist you in improving your SEO performance.

How does HTTPS secure your website and helps it perform better?

• HTTPS protects your website from various cyber attacks and from online criminal activities that can steal important data from your website.
• Migrating your website to HTTPS improves the website speed as your website can avail the capabilities given to HTTPS like HTTP/2.
• When your website is secured with an SSL certificate, it complies with the PCI rules. According to the PCI guidelines, it is mandatory for the websites that take debit card, credit card or bank information from the clients to be secured with HTTPS.
• As Google and other major search engines support secure websites, migrating to HTTPS will boost your website’s SEO performance as well.

HTTP To HTTPS migration checklist for SEO:

Steps Before Migration:

• Select an SSL certificate and buy it
• Create a test server (this step is recommended but optional)
• Check the CDN migration guidelines
• Check the CMS migration guidelines
• Export the backlinks of your website through the Google Search Console or trough any other tool
• Create new Google Search Console profile for HTTPS

Steps During The Migration Process:

• Once you select and purchase the web server, install it on the web server
• Enable HTTPS with 301 redirects
• Update all the internal URL references in accordance with HTTPS
• Update the XML sitemap URLs to HTTPS
• Update the URLs of canonical tag, hreflang tag and alternate tag to work with HTTPS
• Update the existing 301 redirect rules to work with HTTPS

Steps After Migration:

• Update your website URLs to HTTPS
• If you are using any third party tools, update your website URLs there as well
• Update your website details on Google Analytics
• Submit your website’s XML sitemap to Google Search Console
• Keep a watch on your website crawling and indexing in Google Search Console

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