Boost sales on your website with https encryption (SSL)

Google wants website owners to encrypt their websites with https before delivering them to website visitors.

To achieve this they have added SSL as a search engine ranking factor a few years ago.

Since then a large number of websites have added SSL encryption to ensure not only the safety of their website but to achieve a better website ranking.

You can see this when visiting a website because the URL starts with https and the browsers usually display a secure padlock to show the site is safe to visit.

However SSL has a much bigger role to play when it comes to increasing your sales.

That's because customers feel more secure on a website secured with SSL.

And that security translates into an increased willingness to buy from you.

Should you get SSL to boost your search engine ranking?

SSL is one of over 200 ranking factors. How much impact it has on your search engine ranking is not clear.

In fact some studies claim the impact is so small, it can not be detected.

So if you want to make your customers feel secure to boost your sales, get this App.

But if you want to get more traffic to your website with improved search engine rankings, then our SEO APP is a better option.

1: Contact your Hosting Provider to install the SSL certificate for your website and ask your Host to permanently redirect traffic from http to https

There are several ways of doing the https redirect. Your Host should be able to force https as a setting on your Host.

There should be a control panel that you as the merchant can use to do it. Please contact your Hosting provider and ask them to add the configuration settings to the server (or virtual host) to permanently redirect traffic from http to https. They should be able to do that for you.

Or it can be done by adding the "https redirect directive" in the .htaccess file in your shop.

The main step required is to edit the .htaccess file located in  your shop "Runtime" folder.

RewriteEngine on

#Remember protocol

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [env=proto:https]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [env=proto:http]

#Redirect non-www to www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %{ENV:proto}://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

#Redirect to HTTPS

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off

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

2: Save and Close Notepad++ then publish the .htaccess file using a 3rd party FTP such as Filezilla or cuteFTP to your Host

Upload the updated .htaccess file in \Runtime\ by dragging it to your server’s base directory i.e. /public_html/ 

(The .htaccess file must be in the same directory as your index.html file on your Hosting server.)

3: You will need to update your shop to ensure all embedded URLs and links have explicit https:// in it. 

- Content that you put in should also be free of explicit http: in URLs. You should use relative URLs for locations within the site. For example, embedding external links such as Youtube – added links in shop content must use relative URL or explicitly point to https://

- Check your homepage entry in Central dropdown -> Contact Details -> change your URL to have https:// in it in the HOMEPAGE field

- Check your pages and products with embedded links (such as YouTube links or external websites) - ensure they are in https://

- For some hosts – you need to try publishing with http in the Publish URL first to see if there are any errors. If you have publishing issue, you will need you to change your "Publish URL" in your Publish SETUP dialog box to also say, https://www...

4: In your Google Webmaster Tools account –

When you change your website from http to https, you will have to create a new property in your Webmaster Tools account for the https version of your site and add your sitemap to that new property.

If you have not done that yet and you will keep seeing the number of pages being indexed for the http version going down until it will be totally gone (in a few weeks/months). 

This number of http pages being indexed does NOT affect your ranking or SEO at all.

If you add the https property of your website and submit the sitemap there (sitemap.xml) then you will see the number of indexed page grow for the https version.