It is common for businesses to underestimate the amount of traffic they will have on your business or the number of queries they will get. If you have made the same mistake, the chances are you have never thought of using the SSL protection to encrypt sensitive data. The good thing is that it is never too late to make the switch and use the HTTPS protocol to protect data sent across your website.
However, if you’re going to add SSL to an old website, you will have to keep a few points in mind to make your site work efficiently. For instance:
Start by doing a full backup. Make this a habit whenever making any major changes to your site. In case you use cPanel hosting, you can use its built-in backup feature. Otherwise, you may have to talk to your hosting provider for assistance.
Be sure to change all internal links. It is better to create a list of URLs from your main sites and existing sub-domain to check after you have added the SSL protection. A crawler may help make it easier to get the URLs. Moreover, you will have to alter reference to images, CSS, and JavaScript files.
Double-check if your CDN supports SSL or not. Certain CDNs make it easier to set up SSL on any CDN subdomain, while others would require more work.
Pick the right level of SSL considering the nature of your business. You can opt for simple SSL, standard SSL, or extended SSL, depending on the size of your website and the level protection needed.
Pay attention to having a canonical link in the <head> section to ensure that the traffic from http:// gets encrypted when moving to https://. You should also update robots.txt files.
Consider making the move during low-traffic hours because it will help Googlebot re-index your website quickly and effectively. In turn, it will improve your rankings over time.
The fact of the matter is that a number of factors should be considered when adding SSL or switching to HTTPS. Many people think that adding this security layer to your site will slow it down. It may be a true to a certain extent, but you can adopt HTTP/2 once you have upgraded to HTTPS, as it will help optimize your website’s speed, mainly because it is accordance with Google’s SPDY protocol.