How to Retain Blog Traffic After Move From HTTP to HTTPS on Blogger (Blogspot)

Many blogspot users who migrated from HTTP to HTTPS experienced a lot of traffic drop mainly due to the change.

I have carefully compiled a list of some of the issues that I have seen that can cause a blogspot blog to perform poorly after making the switch:

Domain level canonicalization issues

When you make the switch to https, you need to make sure that all links of your site redirect to the correct https version. I have seen some sites where the http://www version of a site redirects to the correct https page, but if you type in http:// without the www, you’ll end up on a non-secure page.

Failure to redirect urls properly

When you switch to https you need to make sure that each url 301 redirects to its https equivalent. I have seen sites where the home page properly redirects to the https version, but the inner pages do not. If you have links pointing to the http version of a page and you’re not redirecting that page to the https version, then you may lose the benefit that comes from those links.

Now, in some cases, Google may be able to figure out that the http version is a canonical of the https version and properly attribute the flow of PageRank that should go to the https page.

If you have both your http and your https pages live, then this can result in duplicate content. If you have a small site, this may not matter too much as Google should figure out which page is best to rank and just rank that one. But, if you have a large site, then this gives Google twice the number of pages to crawl which will eat up your crawl budget and can possibly result in Google not spending as much time crawling your high quality pages.

This also can result in a dilution of the PageRank that flows to your site if you have some links pointing to the http version of a page and some to the https version.

Failure to update canonicals

The canonical tag tells search engines which page is the version that we want indexed. If your https page has a canonical tag that points to the http version, that may end up confusing search engines. Again, Google can usually figure this type of thing out, but not always.

Mixed content issues

This shouldn’t really result in a loss of rankings, but it still is an important issue. If you have a https page, but you’re using images or scripts that are hosted on http pages, then you’ll still get the “non-secure” warning. As such, when you switch to https you need to comb through every page of your site to make sure that this is not happening.

How To Fix?

Just login to your blogger blog locate theme click on edit, then when in the html edit box click crtl+f a search box appears type in http and search then replace all HTTP with HTTPS.

Sitemaps need to be updated

When you switch to https, make sure that your blogger sitemap also redirect to HTTPS as well. Again, Google can probably figure things out if you don’t, but as stated before, we don’t want to continually rely on Google to get things right.

Make sure your certificate doesn’t expire

If your site is running on https and your security certificate expires, then, when Google tries to send visitors to your site they’ll get the big full screen warning I mentioned above. This will most definitely turn people away.

Thank you for reading my post if you have any question or contributions please comment below.