My small niche site has been selling steadily since 1998. Especially the last 5 years our google,Yahoo (& now Bing) placements have been first page, usually top 5, for all our main keywords. On April 15th I let our SSL cert (Comodo) expire for our secure ordering. I didn't know it right away, but got it renewed by April 17 when a regular customer alerted me to the problem. Since that time I have had NO orders! I have checked: functionality of secure order process,keywords results on google, yahoo& bing, competitors' pages for price changes(our prices are much lower than the nearest competitor),blacklists, our google analytics and site stats via server app.
What I noticed was a huge traffic volume drop (75%) on the day the cert expired. But when cert was renewed traffic stats returned to about the same, and -- given other SEO improvements I made to the site in early April -- our rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing were actually improved for ALL our primary keywords since April 17.
I know that when a SSL certificate is expired that Firefox says 'get me out of here', in so many words when a sites' certificate is expired/not valid. IE has similar warnings. Obviously this can't be good, but I'm just wondering if something else is at work. Or has my process somehow been hijacked (I don't think so, but just don't know)
Can anyone think of anything else I should consider as to causality of this dramatic drop in sales. The only other times we had this long without sales were 9/11 and 9/15/08 (Financial Crisis). Anyone have any ideas what might be happening? We're just a few steps short of panic, so any thoughts would be most appreciated.
