: Does https site conversion affects organic traffic? Our site has lost substantial traffic after moving to HTTPS. Most of our Posts which were on first page are on 5-6th page now! We started

@YK1175434

HTTPS site conversion seems pretty easy but it can be pretty risky. For small sites google takes few weeks to crawl new https and for large sites it can take more time. So hang on it may get worse for few more days, depending size of your site.

But stay on HTTPS because there are plenty of reasons like article1 article2

I don't know if you have followed best practices of migrating HTTP to HTTPS. Please consider checking practices again here and few are as follows


Ensure not to have multiple redirects (use chrome redirect path extension) check the Question for detail
Ensure all your internal links point to the new one HTTPS URLs.
Ensure that all rel=canonical tags
Add https property in all search engines and check regularly
Try to change Your old links to https

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@Harper822

Our site has lost substantial traffic after moving to HTTPS.


Keyword here is moving.

If you just changed everything over to HTTPS from HTTP (and got rid of the HTTP version), then many robots that had access to your site before the change will think you don't have a site anymore since they will come across a series of "404 not found" based pages generated from your server which is bad news.

What you need to do is create redirects for every HTTP page you previously made available to the public so that users who try to access the old pages will be automatically redirected to the new pages. To ensure the redirect is perfect, ensure the HTTP header response for the old page contains HTTP code 301 (moved permanently) and that a location header exists pointing to the HTTPS version of the same page. Redbot.org is a good tool to verify that your headers are correct.


Should we go back to our last without HTTPS version?


If you do that, you might throw people off all the more because they may have one version in their bookmarks and if you switch back again with no regards to implementing redirects, then you'll frustrate the new batch of people since they will get the dreaded 404 error.

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