I am sure many of you have seen the migration of Http to Https. But when did it start? Back in August, 2014 when Google announced it was a ranking factor. They said the top priority for Google is security. They said that they are working to make the internet more safe and were very helpful to provide resources to help webmasters fix their security breaches.

I do not think Google were doing this to be helpful to us. It costs money to be an SSL certificate but to get people to use SSL it became a ranking factor. In 2014, they said it would only affect 1% of global queries but they did warn that they may strengthen it as they want to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPs.

This SEO Jo Blogs site is what I work on in my free time. Like many in the SEO industry, we may also be busy attending events or running our own, outside of the day job. I enjoy writing on SEO Jo Blogs and covering events from conferences such as Webcertain, however I admit I had delayed migrating to HTTPs as I thought it would negatively Impact my site.

I decided to use OnCrawl to see how moving from HTTP to HTTPs would impact my site and these are the results.

Aa you can see before the site migration, the site had 82 pages that were “slow”. This was 20% of the total pages.

We then migrated to HTTPs and I re-ran the speed test. On HTTPs, the number of “slow” pages increased from 82 pages to 129 pages. This was 32.3% of the pages of the site.

So why was the site running slower after HTTPs? My hosting provider never mentioned there would be a negative impact on the speed of the site. BUT poor hosting does have an impact on site performance. You get what you pay for, so if you are paying for “cheap” hosting, then the speed of your website may be affected and even so after the migration to HTTPs.

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