Change to https now – simple steps!
Does your site run https already? Well, it should! We have made the simplest guide on the internet for you to migrate your site to https.
What is ssl and https?
Well, I will be honest with you, it doesn’t matter. I could write several paragraphs with all the details, but in fact it would be a waste of time reading it.
Having https makes your site more secure, and that’s more than enough for you to know. There are only two main reasons (behind security) why you should change your site to https:
- Search engines will rank you higher immediately after changing to https.
- Web browsers now show if a site is “secure” or “not secure” and the only criteria is whether it uses https or not.
Which of the below sites would you rather visit?
or
First it looks such a small thing, but it’s always there. That little title telling your visitors that what they are doing is Not secure.
A couple of years ago they said you should only care about https if your site handles sensible data (eg. credit card info etc.). But now https is becoming the standard while http is a remnant of the past.
So you don’t really have a choice. You will have to change it sooner or later.
Changing to https is easy
Well, if your hosting company is good then the change is super easy and I will show you all the steps. If your hosting company doesn’t provide free and easy ssl, it may be much more complicated and this guide won’t be enough.
So first of all, you should make a little research to see if your hosting plan includes free ssl and what the process is to turn it on.
I have my websites hosted by WebHostingHub and (to my biggest surprise) this is how hard it was turning https on for all of my sites:
Yeah, I have logged into the domain management panel, I clicked on “Manage free basic ssl” and then turned the switch to “ON”. I also hit “Run check now” and after 20 minutes all my sites were available through https as well.
6 simple steps for your site to use https
Of course, this is only the first step and it only means that your site can be reached via https. So what does it mean? It means that when someone enters http://yoursite.com to the browser, it will navigate to the unsecure version of your site. If someone enters https://yoursite.com, the browser will show the secure site (with possible unsecure elements).
So you will have to carry out the following steps to migrate your whole site to https and leave the unsecure past behind.
Before taking the following steps, please make sure that your site can already be reached via https!
1, Add your site’s https version in Google Search Console
Just log in to Google Search Console / Google Webmaster Tools and add https://yoursite.com as a new property.
It may take a week till you see the results, but anyway, you will need it to see search statistics for your secure site, too.
2, Install and activate “Better Search Replace” plugin in WordPress
It’s pretty straightforward.
But before proceeding any further, make sure you backup your whole site. Either use the official WordPress backup in your hosting solution, or install plugin UpdraftPlus and use it.
But anyway, make sure you have a backup, just in case.
3, Change everything to https
With the plugin you have just installed you can change all references in your WordPress database. Why is it neccessary? To avoid having a “mixed” site, which means that part of your site is secure but some elements are not.
For example, you may have a post which is already secure and displayed through https, but all the images used are referenced as http://yoursite.com/image.jpg, which is not secure. Also, you may have other links, objects, references etc. still having the “http” prefix.
To change all these references at once you can use the above plugin. You just enter your old sitename to the search field and the https version to the replace field. Then select all the tables (click on one and hit CTRL-A), and then uncheck the “Dry run” checkbox.
Cross your fingers and wait till the process finishes.
It will take about a minute or so and then you will be logged out immediately from WordPress.
Don’t panic, it only happens because you were logged in to your WP dashboard through http and your site is suddenly shifted to https. So just log in again and you will see the result message of the replace procedure:
4, Log in to Google Analytics and change the Default URL of your site
It’s pretty straightforward, this is what you have to change:
5, Re-route all http traffic to https
For this you will have to edit your .htaccess file which is in the base folder of your site.
So go to your site’s base folder through ftp or via cPanel / ftp access, make a backup copy of .htaccess file and once you have it, edit the original file and add the following lines to it:
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
What these 3 lines do for you is they will re-route all traffic coming to the http version of your site to the https version. Be careful though, this file can mess up things, so make sure you do it properly.
Once done, just type http://yoursite.com to your browser. As you hit enter, it should open the https version of your site!
6, Check if everything is working fine
This process (as every migration) has of course some minor risks (that’s why we have made a backup of everything that we have changed), but if you have carefully followed the steps, now your site runs https! It wasn’t that hard, was it?
As a final step, you should check your pages that everything is displayed right, just like before, but now under https.
Congratulations! You have just made your site more secure, have improved your site’s overall rank in every search engine and upgraded your site to 21th century website security standards!
2 COMMENTS
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