Ramifications of Converting to HTTPS Site Wide?

[Brett_Tabke]

Getting ready to flip the switch on a site to HTTPS entirely. It is a 10 year old domain with modest rankings (15k referrals a day from Google). It is a site that has very "privacy sensitive" community and https will help it grow within that community.

What do you think of that?
What will be the fallout?
Will rankings be terminated? Referrals?

[RhinoFish]

Did it twice, rankings went up ever so slightly. In fact, visit duration and conversion rates seemed to also increase, but a tiny amount. So small that I'm saying don't do this to get gains, but don't worry about losses from doing it. When we crossed over, the indexing was fast.

Both times, we had empty robots.txt files, no rel= links, and not even a sitemap, so perhaps the slate was clean. Make sure you don't have remnant disallows for https for a bit before you cross over, I think engines could be confused by this (I'm not an SEO).

Disclaimer: I'm a PPC guy, not an SEO guy, I don't use any SEO ranking services, I'm relaying what small glances at data that seemed to be happening, not hard, reliable, torn into stats at all.

Keep an eye on this:
[searchengineland.com...]

Test mobile speed on an https test page before you go.

If you host videos, the scripts always have tanked us up on protocols, test that too, before.

Knowing you, nothing here I said is of value to you Brett! I do look forward to hearing how it went for you!

[jay5r]

I converted a forum site to SSL back in September 2012. Before the change the site was getting 600-700 new visits from Google in a typical day. That dropped and hit bottom at 325 visits about a week later. But then things climbed back to normal about 3 weeks after the change and have continued to go up ever since.

I'm sure you'll have everything on the site SSL - just check for resources off-site that may not be served with SSL. Video embeds, online status icons at different services like Skype - stuff like that.

[incrediBILL]

What will be the fallout?

Speed.

Unless you're doing SSL in hardware with an SSL accelerator it can put a bit of a load on the server.

It also slows the client side down a bit, older machines will find if a tad noticeable.

[tangor]

two sites converted to ssl resulted in minor change in traffic... and logs revealed it was older os/browsers which dropped a few points. Nothing drastic, but certainly measurable.

[creeking]

adminextra forum recently changed to SSL.

with all the news about GOV snooping, I could see more forums going to SSL.

has anyone published any speed comparisons, or before/after speeds?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Worth mentioning a recently discovered vulnerability in OpenSSL recent versions ... [en.slashdot.org...]

[Brett_Tabke]

awesome input. thanks.

> with all the news about GOV snooping

SSL privacy is about corp/isp snooping. I believe the govt can decode ssl on-the-fly...no problemo.