Moving to https, two sites, both lost traffic

[seosutra]

Case #1 - wordpress site

We had a site that was generating around 13K-15K sessions each month. Around June 15 we switched to https... set up 301 redirections, made all url update, WMT sitemap updates plus added structured data to the site...

All new pages have been crawled, however the traffic is now around 7.5K to 8K and there is no other content updates that is done on the website.. nor have we done any seo changes apart from adding structured data.

Case #2 - Html site

another of our website was switched to using https around the same time... and this html site is affected severely... lost all top rankings... this was a #1 site on a few keywords... lost many places since the update...

no content updates were done, all things were taken care of while making the switch....

if it helps... both the sites uses cloudflare service.

Looking for some pointers to arrest this damage.

[rainborick]

Both sites sound like they're mature, well-established sites and that often means that their backlinks come from a wide variety of pages scattered through the web and they point to many different pages on your sites. So it's not really that surprising that Google hasn't fully crawled and reassigned the link connections involved yet. Largely, I think you're just going to have to wait things out. The only other thing I can think of for you to do, if you haven't done so already, would be to go through the Change of Address process in WMT.

[robzilla]

Switching to HTTPS is a change of protocol, not of address, so I wouldn't recommend that.

I've switched several sites over to HTTPS and never noticed a blip. The first step would be to make 100% sure your technical implementation of HTTPS is correct (do a thorough SSL test, check for mixed content -- even WebmasterWorld is guilty of that). How soon did traffic decline after you put the redirects in place? See if you can find any patterns in your analytics, or Google's (WMT), and check your logs for errors.

[mrengine]

When I switched to https, my site took a dive for a couple weeks and then returned to its normal ranking. Some transitions appear to go smooth while others it's a short trip on a rocky road. But if all your technicals are right, Google should sort it out soon. At least that is my experience.

[Robert Charlton]

seosutra - You probably know all this, but, just in case, some fundamental things that should be checked. Have you double-checked your server header responses for all pages, both for http and https? You should be seeing 301 redirects to https for the http requests, and 200 responses for the https requests.

How about checking your canonical tags, as well as your navigation code? You don't want anything conflicting with old urls. With root relative nav urls, your nav code doesn't depend on protocol declaration in your nav urls... but conflicting urls would confuse Google.

Have you double-checked that your CloudFlare certificates and settings are order?

I suspect previous posters are correct and for various reasons it might just take a while, but, at this point, where it's been over a month, I'd certainly recheck some of the basics.

[seosutra]

Thanks for the pointers... I will go over them again and double check everything. I do not want to make any hasty changes to the site as it has quality content. I will update again in a few weeks with the status.

[seosutra]

Quick Update... its been around 8 weeks since we have switched to https

#1 - Wordpress + CloudFlare SSL
[gyazo.com...]
Site is getting 20% less traffic from search results. (above chart shows acquisitions from search engines)

#2 html + cloudfalre ssl
site is working its way up... but still 25% less traffic compared to post https change.