Move to HTTPS... is it worth the stress?

[lee_sufc]

I have a site which is 50% advice and 50% eCommerce. The eCommerce section of the website is on HTTPS pages for obvious reasons. However, for me to change over the rest of the site it is going to be a massive headache.

I've been reading more and more about how Google could penalise non-HTTPS sites. Is it worth me stressing over and moving everrything to HTTPS or will it be OK to stay as I am?

[Wilburforce]

I am not sure how much a sitemap contributes to SEO

A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to establish both the contents and the structure of your site. At worst, submitting one will probably get your pages crawled and indexed more quickly, and if it is a large site that is not trivial: if it isn't indexed, it won't rank.

Optimisation isn't just about where your page ends up in the SERPs: it is about how quickly it gets there, or gets into the results at all. In that sense, a sitemap makes an important contribution. Whether it makes any difference at all to a page's final position is more questionable, but I wouldn't omit one for that reason.

In your case, you are wanting Google to re-index a large number of pages, and to me it makes obvious sense to summarise for Google which pages these are.

Earlier posts in this thread have addressed slow indexing as a problem, and Not Submitting a Site Map would come high on my list of underlying conditions that might account for it.

[guggi2000]

@Wilburforce.

Speed is a very strong argument. Thanks.

I wasn't aware that the priority tag of the sitemap lost its importance so we will go with a simple Text file.

We have 100,000 files. Do you think that if we forget to add a few files (20-50) in the sitemap it will be damaging? Or if we add a reference to a file that we have removed at one point, will that be damaging? I am not talking about the main files, but the unimportant ones...