HTTPS SEO: Importance, Impact & Migration Tips
Do you know, according to Google’s Transparency Report, over 89% of pages loaded by Chrome now use HTTPS. Thinking, why so? It’s all due to the increasing number of cyber attacks, and therefore, prioritizing website security is now more important than ever. Using HTTPS can enhance your website’s security and have a significant impact on HTTPS SEO.
Google has confirmed that secure websites are favored more in search rankings. That’s why Google HTTPS SEO has become a widely discussed topic among digital marketers. To know everything about this term, read the blog till the end!
Want to Make Your Website Secure and SEO-Friendly?
Find out how to enhance rankings, safeguard your users, and migrate securely to HTTPS. Get expert-backed tips, a step-by-step checklist, and insights into how SSL helps in SEO.
What is HTTPS?
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. It is an extension of HTTP that offers encrypted communication between a user’s web browser and a website. You can obtain it by installing an SSL certificate on your site.
How Does SSL Help In SEO?
SSL in SEO plays a crucial role by enabling HTTPS, which Google uses as a ranking factor. It helps build trust with users through the use of the padlock icon, which reduces bounce rates and improves engagement, two key signals for search engines. SSL also preserves referral data in tools like Google Analytics, ensuring that you drive more traffic to your website.
Additionally, it enables your site to support HTTP/2, resulting in faster loading speeds. Overall, using SSL in SEO improves site security, user trust, performance, and ultimately, your search rankings. But many website owners still ask, “Does HTTPS affect SEO in a major way, or is it just optional?” Let’s explore that next.
Did you know? As HTTPS becomes the standard for secure browsing, major web browsers are stepping up to protect users. Google Chrome now flags HTTP websites as “Not Secure,” warning visitors before they even engage. Mozilla Firefox has taken it a step further with its HTTPS-Only Mode, which forces sites to load securely whenever possible.
HTTPS Vs HTTP in SEO and Their Basic Difference
Let’s illustrate the difference with a basic, regular-day scenario. When you search online for something, you may have noticed that some site URLs start with “http://” whereas others begin with “https://”. Websites that feature HTTP are less secure compared to those that begin with HTTPS.
One more thing, based on which you can say which protocol is used by a website, is by “Looking at the address bar of the browser.” Sites that use HTTPS display a padlock icon on the left side of the address bar. So next time you feel unsure whether a website uses this or not, don’t stress. Simply look at the address bar for the “lock” sign. Hopefully, the basic difference between these two terms is now clear.
Let’s go further into understanding HTTPS vs HTTP in SEO:
|
Aspect |
HTTP |
HTTPS |
|---|---|---|
|
Referral Data in Analytics |
Sometimes lost |
Preserved more accurately |
|
E-commerce Compatibility |
Not compliant with PCI standards |
Required for payment security |
|
Google Ranking |
Lower ranking potential |
Slight ranking boost from Google |
|
User Experience (UX) |
Lower trust, higher bounce rates |
Better trust, improved UX |
|
Browser Behavior |
May show a warning in Chrome/Firefox |
No warnings if the certificate is valid |
Why is it Important to have HTTPS for Your Website?
While HTTPS is best known for encrypting data and keeping your website secure, its benefits go far beyond just privacy protection. Here’s why HTTPS is important:
1. Enhanced Security
HTTPS secures the data exchanged between your website and users, safeguarding sensitive information like passwords, personal details, and credit card numbers. It prevents hackers from intercepting or tampering with data during transmission, making your site safer for visitors and crucial for any business handling sensitive information.
2. Builds Trust and Credibility
Modern browsers display a padlock icon for HTTPS websites, signaling safety. Without HTTPS, users see a “Not Secure” warning, which can damage credibility. A secure connection reassures visitors, increasing their confidence in your brand and encouraging them to stay, engage, and convert on your site.
3. Improved Performance with HTTP/2
HTTPS enables HTTP/2, a newer protocol that speeds up website loading through features like multiplexing and header compression. Since speed affects bounce rate and SEO, HTTPS SEO improves engagement, search rankings, and faster load times.
4. Accurate Referral Data
When your site uses HTTPS and receives visitors from other secure websites, referral data is accurately passed along. In contrast, HTTP often loses this data, showing it as “direct traffic” in analytics. HTTPS ensures cleaner, more reliable tracking, helping you better understand your traffic sources and optimize your SEO efforts.
5. Required for Many Modern Web Features
Many advanced web features, such as geolocation, push notifications, service workers, and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), require HTTPS to function properly. Without a secure setup, your site may lack these capabilities. Google HTTPS SEO ensures your site is future-ready, supporting modern web standards and features users expect.
Why is HTTPS important for SEO?
Now that you know why it is important to have HTTPS for your website? Let’s move further to learn why Google favors it and how it directly benefits your SEO performance.
1. HTTPS Is a Google Ranking Signal
Another reason HTTPS SEO ranking is important is that secure websites are often crawled and indexed more efficiently by search engines. When your site has a secure infrastructure, it reduces the risk of interruptions or blocks during crawling, ensuring that more of your pages get discovered and added to Google’s index.
In Google’s eyes, secure websites are more trustworthy. That aligns with their mission to deliver safe, high-quality content to users. So, if you’re asking “Does HTTPS help SEO?”, the answer is a clear yes, it may not shoot your site to the top instantly, but it certainly supports upward movement in search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Improves Crawlability and Indexing
Another reason HTTPS SEO is important is that secure websites are often crawled and indexed more efficiently by search engines. When your site has a secure infrastructure, it reduces the risk of interruptions or blocks during crawling, ensuring that more of your pages get discovered and added to Google’s index.
Improved crawlability can have a direct impact on your HTTPS SEO ranking, especially for content-heavy or eCommerce sites, because it ensures that your entire domain and all its subdomains remain accessible and reliable, which translates to stronger visibility in search results.
3. Reduces Bounce Rates Through Increased Trust
Modern web users are increasingly cautious about security. When visitors see browser warnings like “Not Secure” on an HTTP site, they’re more likely to leave immediately, hurting your engagement metrics. On the other hand, HTTPS websites display the familiar padlock icon, reassuring users that their connection is safe.
This sense of security encourages longer sessions, lower bounce rates, and higher engagement, clear signals of strong HTTPS SEO ranking potential. When users trust your site, they stay longer, interact more, and convert better, which tells Google that your content is trustworthy and worth ranking.
4. Preserves Referral Data in Analytics
When a user clicks from one HTTPS site to another HTTPS site, referral data (like the source URL) is passed along and captured in analytics platforms like Google Analytics. However, when traffic moves from HTTPS to an HTTP site, this referral data can be lost, appearing as “direct traffic” instead.
This makes it hard to determine where your visitors are coming from. Using HTTPS SEO ensures accurate traffic attribution, helping you understand which SEO campaigns and referral sources are truly driving performance. For marketers and analysts, this is a crucial advantage for optimizing strategy and allocating resources effectively.
5. Required for Modern Web Features That Enhance SEO
While not always obvious, HTTPS is also essential for enabling technologies that directly and indirectly impact SEO, such as HTTP/2 (which speeds up site loading) and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). These tools improve load times and user experience factors that Google increasingly values when ranking websites.
Google has also introduced features like Core Web Vitals, where page speed and interaction quality are part of the ranking algorithm. Since HTTPS SEO is required for these features to work, your SEO success is closely tied to your website being secure.
Hopefully, your doubt regarding “Is HTTPS better for SEO” is now resolved. It is no longer optional, and it’s essential for staying competitive, trusted, and visible in search results.
How to Safely Switch from HTTP to HTTPS to Improve SEO?
If you haven’t made a move to HTTPS SEO yet, it’s time to do it. Here’s a step-by-step process to help you switch your site safely and preserve your SEO performance:
Step 1: Purchase and Install an SSL Certificate
Start by purchasing an SSL certificate from a reputable and trusted certificate authority, or check if your current hosting provider includes a free SSL certificate as part of their hosting plan; many do. If a free option is available, take advantage of it to save costs while still securing your website.
Once you’ve obtained the SSL certificate, follow the installation process provided by your hosting provider, typically accessible through the hosting control panel or dashboard. This step is crucial in enabling HTTPS and securing data transmission between your website and its visitors.
If you want a reliable hosting provider, our suggestion is Bluehost, one of the best and user-friendly hosting providers.
Step 2: Update Your Website Links to HTTPS
Update all internal links, scripts, images, and other website resources by changing their URLs from http:// to https:// to ensure everything loads securely. This not only improves your site’s security and user trust but also helps maintain proper functionality across all pages. Whenever possible, use relative URLs to simplify the process and future-proof your site’s structure.
Making your entire website HTTPS-compliant can enhance your SEO performance, strengthen credibility, and ultimately help you get more leads for your business by building a safer and more reliable user experience.
Step 3: Set Up 301 Redirects
Implement 301 redirects from all existing HTTP URLs to their corresponding HTTPS versions to ensure a smooth and permanent transition to a secure site. These redirects signal to search engines that the move is intentional and permanent, helping to consolidate link equity and avoid duplicate content issues.
By doing this, you maintain your current SEO value, protect your search engine rankings, and ensure users are automatically directed to the secure version of your site without any interruptions or confusion. Proper redirection is a crucial step in maintaining both your visibility and credibility online.
Step 4: Update Canonical Tags
Ensure that your canonical URLs are updated to the new HTTPS versions to prevent duplicate content issues and effectively unify your site’s ranking signals. Implementing canonical tags SEO helps search engines identify the preferred version of a page, avoiding indexing of duplicate content and consolidating ranking power.
When migrating to HTTPS or updating your site structure, reviewing and updating your canonical tags is crucial to maintaining strong SEO performance and avoiding ranking conflicts.
Step 5: Update Your Sitemap and Robots.txt
Update your XML sitemap to include only HTTPS URLs, and resubmit it to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to ensure search engines crawl and index the correct, secure versions of your pages.
Also, check your robots.txt file for any references to HTTP URLs and update them to HTTPS to avoid blocking or misguiding crawlers. Keeping these technical elements aligned with your HTTPS migration helps maintain strong SEO performance and ensures search engines properly understand and index your secure site structure.
Step 6: Fix Mixed Content Issues
Ensure that all elements on your site, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files, are loaded over HTTPS. Failing to do so can trigger mixed content warnings, which not only break the visual and functional integrity of your site but also reduce user trust and security.
These warnings can negatively impact your SEO, user experience, and even lead to issues related to duplicate content SEO if versions of pages exist under both HTTP and HTTPS. Conduct a thorough audit to identify any non-secure elements and update their URLs accordingly. Keeping your entire site fully HTTPS-compliant ensures better performance, stronger security, and improved rankings.
Step 7: Update External Tools and Integrations
Update your site address in tools like:
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Social media platforms
- Ad tracking or marketing tools
Step 8: Test and Monitor
Use tools like Why No Padlock and SSL Labs to ensure everything is configured correctly after your HTTPS migration. These tools help detect insecure elements, mixed content, or SSL certificate issues that could harm your site’s credibility.
Once the setup is complete, regularly monitor your site performance, traffic, and search engine rankings to identify any issues that may arise. Tracking these metrics helps you quickly identify drops in visibility, page speed issues, or crawling errors, allowing you to take corrective action and maintain strong SEO health.
The Final Thoughts
If you’re still wondering, “Is HTTPS better for SEO?”, the answer is “yes”. It protects your users, strengthens your site’s credibility, and gives you a competitive edge in search results. Don’t wait for browser warnings or SEO penalties to force the switch; take action now!
Additional Tip: Tech Savy Crew delivers professional SEO services designed to increase your visibility, improve rankings, and drive consistent conversions. From strategic keyword planning to technical optimization, we fine-tune every aspect of your website to turn it into a high-performing, lead-generating machine powered by smart, data-driven SEO.