How to easily switch your website from http to https in wordpress without messing anything up! Step by step guide to making the shift – and why you need to!
HTTP versus HTTPS
What is all this I keep hearing about needing to switch to HTTPS?! How do I switch my blog to HTTPS?
This is a question I’ve been getting ALL OVER THE PLACE from new bloggers and veterans alike, so I want to address it for you in case you’re wondering too!
Basically, Google has decided that it wants everyone to be a secure “HTTPS” site and is trying to do away with the HTTP prefix.
They have been giving a page rank bonus to those who make the switch, and a security notice now appears on you site if you don’t have the HTTPS security certificate installed.
How to Switch to HTTPS
While the idea of needing to switch can sound overwhelming and scary, it’s actually quite easy! And in most cases, it will only take a few minutes.
1. Contact your web hosting provider and ask them to switch you. Siteground switched me completely for free and it only took 3 minutes!
2. Make sure you have a green bar! When your site is fully switched over, you will have a green bar in the address bar when someone visits your site. This shows them that you are a secure site.
If you don’t have that (check here to see what it should look like), then contact your host and/or your web developer to find out where the hangup is.
3. Recover your social share counts (at the bottom of your post where it says “pinned 4K” and so on…). This is lost when the website changes from HTTP to HTTPS as most social share plugins can’t deal with the site change.
There are 2 ways to deal with this and get your share counts back!
1, Get the Social Warfare Pro plugin ($30 a year)
or what I did…
2. Get the Sassy Social Shares plugin and the additional plugin Recover Social Shares ($10 one time fee).
Boom, done!
If you have any website addresses “hard coded” into your theme, you will need to update them to show the new HTTPS address, but if you don’t have anything like that, then you are all done!
This is something that eventually you will need to do, so go ahead and do it now. It really only takes a few minutes and will give you a boost on your search rankings!
PIN THIS FOR LATER
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