Google: When Going HTTPS, Migrate Whole Site At Once

Google’s John Mueller said at the 15:36 minute mark into the last Google hangout from Friday that if you are moving to HTTPs, you should move your whole site all at once. He said don’t move it section by section or page by page, do it all at once because it helps Google know the whole site is moving.

In the past, Google said it is okay to move one page at a time but Google has also said switching URLs and going HTTPS is different and Google handles them differently.

John said “what I would do with a move to HTTPS is just move everything at once.” When you do this HTTPS change, Google does “try to process that a little faster” and doing the whole site helps Google understand this. If you do not do it all at once, John said “takes a lot longer and there is a bit more room for error.”

Here is the embed:

Here is the transcript:

In general, what I would do with a move to HTTPS is just move everything at once.

We do try to recognize site moves like this where you are moving a bigger part of your web site to a new set up. We try to process that a little faster. And it helps us to really know that the whole web site has actually moved.

So if you are doing this in steps what generally happens is it takes a lot longer and there is a bit more room for error. Because we might be missing something, we might be assuming that you are only moving part of your web site, and next month the next part comes, how and where do we combine these things?

So my recommendation there would be to just bite the bullet and do that change completely.

If you want to test this from a technical point of view, make sure your HTTPS set up is working as expected. So that is something that I’d say is outside of this SEO type move. But once you are sure that technically everything is set up properly, I’d just do that move. 301 redirects are the perfect method for doing this.

In general, if you move to HTTPS, for the most part it will be very smooth. It won’t be the case that you’d drop out of the search results completely. However, anytime you do a bigger move on a web site or any bigger change on a web site there are potentially fluctuations that can help. So that is something you’d want to keep in mind. If things do fluctuate a bit, don’t panic, it will pass.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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