Many webmasters who own a website for many years wondering whether they should move their entire website from HTTP to HTTPS URLs. I witnessed 2 situations where the websites lost its traffic after the move to HTTPs. Consequently, I don’t advise to move already existing websites to HTTPs using 301 redirects. The screenshot below shows the Google traffic of a website that has been moved to HTTPs in may 2017. The theme didn’t change and the posts haven’t changed. No plugins have been added.
However, there is another safe solution. You can install
Canonical tags: the most important
In order to avoid any trouble, it is better to have a canonical tag in place on every URL pointing to the HTTP version of your website. Consequently, even if a bot can crawl an HTTPs version of a page, there will always be a canonical tag showing that the URL that should be indexed is the HTTP version of the website. It is ok not to add any 301 redirects because
The following URL may return the exact same page. In the canonical tag of this URL, http://mydomain.com will always be the canonical URL 4 times.
- http://mydomain.com
- http://www.mydomain.com
- https://mydomain.com
- https://www.mydomain.com
Then, if you have an Ecommerce website like woocommerce installed on your WordPress website you can add 301 redirects just for the pages belonging to the shop.