The SEO-Friendly Way to Migrate a Website from HTTP to HTTPS for Free

This is a great article, with lots of good information. Very relevant now that Google is going to start prioritizing sites with SSL...


Getting a valid TLS / SSL certificate without spending a penny is very simple. To do it, you just need to visit Startssl.com (for non-commercial use only). If you need a commercial-friendly certificate there is a very cheap solution at Namecheap to get a SHA256 cert for $9.

Before you do this, however, I’ll show you how to install everything you need, because merely obtaining a valid certificate does not make us safer. I also recommend you to use a non-SHA1 certificatecause Chrome is going to kill the support to it soon. In this tutorial, I will focus on one possible configuration for an Apache environment; and I’ll show you what to do with a WordPress website at the application level.

The first part of this tutorial will also be useful for non-WP-based applications. In addition to showing you how to install a certificate, I will explain how to migrate a website with an eye on SEO, avoiding unpleasant incidents of internal duplication and errors that could make the site unusable.