Lost Google Traffic after Switch to HTTPS
 

I made the switch last month.

My monthly Google Search Performance report the month prior was:

300k web clicks and 2 M impressions

My latest report was:

20k web clicks and 120k impressions

Now I'm not sure how accurate that is because I have another stats script saying my Google traffic is down 40% rather than almost 90%.

The search console is showing that everyday I'm getting more and more clicks in a linear, upward curve, which means Google is slowly (VERY slowly) indexing and ranking me where I used to be, but at this rate it will take a year. It's also showing 4k pages indexed of 31k. I submitted a sitemap to be safe but seems not to have made a difference.

This sucks. I've read the stories about people taking losses afterward who were all told that they had nothing to worry about. I feel like I eventually will regain my previous rankings but it's still an anxiety inducing process.

Luckily I have lots of bookmarks, some trades, social etc... to keep me going for now. But income has been affected.

Just posting my experience for reference in case anyone else is planning to join the switch-to-https-late club. It had to be done at one point and right now, during Google's HCU is probably the best time.

Are you sure the switch worked? Maybe you still have mixed content issues which prevents people using the site.

Also, are all redirects and canonicals fixed?

I'd check your redirects.

If they're not working right, all those pages that were indexed with HTTP://yoursite.com are just getting server errors at best, rather than going to HTTPS://yoursite.com.

Use this and test your SSL

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

if you are using cloudflare check if the url patterns is configured correctly.

I think that during algo updates/refreshes crawling is slowing down a lot and google had a few of them in recently. It's because they use resources to push update. Give it some more time, it's also possible that these updates affected your site.

I assume you did a 301? Was this just one site or all your sites? Did you update canonical references to https (if the links are under your control)? Did you create a new sitemap for https urls? If everything was done correctly, Google should start indexing the new pages and will (eventually) give you the backlink credit to the https versions. It may take weeks, but eventually, the benefit of being on https will outweight the initial cost of losing traffic.
WG

Thanks for the replies so far.

I'm not sure how to check redirects except through other site checkers. I tried these 3:

1. https://www.redirect-checker.org/
CONGRATULATION. Everything seems to be fine.

https://www .domain. com/
200 OK

2. https://www.whatsmydns.net/redirect-checker
1 http://www .domain. com/ 301 Moved Permanently
Visit
2 https://www. domain. com/ 200 OK
Visit

3. https://smallseotools.com/redirect-checker/
200
No Redirection Found

__________

I'm using this code in my htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

If there is a good site anyone recommends to check the redirects let me know.

I also did an ssl check and that was good.

One thing I don't know is how to fix canonicals. I thought Google would automatically choose the https.

Redirect rules look ok, except I'd hardcode the specific version you want to use (ie: you want to avoid chaining redirects from http domain -> htts domain -> https www domain. Have all requests go to the final version. I'd also make sure you leave the original sitemap as-is and add an https specific version and Google will see the redirect from http to https.
WG

Thanks.

How do I get all redirects to go to one version, say https://domain .com ?

My site map uploaded has all https links in it. Should I upload one that is also http? Or combine them?

Shouldn't you just have your Host do the SSL updates/re-directs and be done with it? Or am I missing something here?

Sorry you got hit like this tho. It may not take a whole year to recoup your listings but having the revenue affected really bites, especially this time of year! Best of luck in resolving this quickly.

The host does the SSL update but the redirect is my responsibility, although I have heard of some hosts doing that for clients.

Yeah, it had to happen and hopefully it won't take a year. I was just saying that based on the rate of traffic growth at the moment which will hopefully accelerate exponentially.

Hire someone to fix it for you, this could kill your whole site if it isn't done right

But hire them for what? What's the issue exactly? If there is one.

Are you using cloudflare? How did you setup your SSL? Are you using cloudflares free SSL or do you have an SSL certificate installed on your server? do you have force HTTP to HTTPS on in cloudflare? there are so many possibilities that could be going on, what control panel are you using for your hosting? are you using the free SSL called letsencrypt that comes with most hosting panels?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

This happens but it doesn't last forever. Maximum loss is a few months. This happened to before I figured out OPEN SSL

First thing I would do, is change it back immediately.

Then I'd work on 1 site at a time and make 1 change at a time and see the results. Eventually you'll find the issue before applying it to everything else.

It seems like a simple change but if you're using cloudflare and wordpress, there could be additional steps, I had to make changes in wordpress settings, DNS, and in cloudflare to make it work properly for each domain.

Using LetsEncrypt free via my host. No cloudflare. Using htaccess to redirect http to https.

If I did hire someone, where would I find them?

Thanks. I'll test this out soon.

What do you mean? Was there a problem with your SSL certificate that you resolved which made things better?

Thanks. It's been a month already, I worry I've already lost my old http rankings and would just set myself back if I reverted. I'm not sure though so I'll research this more and think about doing just that.

No cloudflare or wordpress, just simple html and some php scripts, which is why I thought it should be simple enough.

I read a bunch of tutorials beforehand, read other people's experiences and thought I had everything covered. Some people reported this very thing happening and they were seasoned webmasters.

Oh, and I've checked my SSL and all site SSL checkers show it's all good.

This guy also seemed to have the same experience as me.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com...ching-to-https

Did you have an old sitemap for http? I'm assuming it was sitemap.xml or something to that nature. I'd leave that one alone and create a sitemaps.xml which is identical except its all your https versions. Then submit the new sitemap (sitemaps.xml). Google should start to index the new pages and once it sees the 301 redirect from http to https, it will eventually prioritize the https version.
WG

No I never had an older http sitemap. The word was that they were useless and even a Google exec insinuated they were worthless so I never bothered.

When I search in "G" my site, site:domain .com I get 31k results. So they indexed my whole site, or the sitemap with the https pages. It's just not giving me the traffic yet.

I think it's most likely due to the recent Core update. Lots of people reporting huge drops in traffic in the past couple of weeks, myself included. I was at 100K clicks per day then on the 21st November it suddenly dropped to 400 per day, no manual actions or anything.

Probably just a coincidence that this happened around the time that you switched to HTTPS. Hopefully it sorts itself out in a few months

Do you have ai text?

Sitemaps are useful in that it tells Google what pages and what weighting that page should be assigned relative to your site. It's at Google's discretion whether or not to index that page, but at least you can see a status behind each page submitted as to whether Google opted to include it or not. Even if the value isn't that large, at least Google knows about the page with sitemaps.
WG

usually when you switch over to https google has to re-index everything again. It's like creating a brand new website so you lose most of your traffic.

That's why many didn't want to switch over to https man years ago. You're way late.
You'll just have to wait. If most of your traffic is your normal customers then its not big deal. If not, then you're screwed for a long while