: Using an HTTPS-only version of your site is not going to hurt your ranking, as long as during the switch (assuming you switched from a previous non-HTTPS) you apply all the necessary redirects.

Using an HTTPS-only version of your site is not going to hurt your ranking, as long as during the switch (assuming you switched from a previous non-HTTPS) you apply all the necessary redirects.

However, I do not recommend using a self-signed certificate for a production website. There are essentially two reasons:

The first one, is that users will notice a big red warning trying to load your site telling them that the certificate is not signed by a certificate authority and should not be trusted.

This is not definitely a good image for your website.
The second is essentially connected with the first. Because the certificate is not trusted, clients may refuse to connect to it. Clients include user browsers, but also crawlers and you may experience an impact on your visibility.

You should use a self-signed certificate only for testing. Purchase a trusted certificate for production.

Certificates today are very cheap, especially standard domain validated certificates.

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