About one year ago, last August 2014, I moved this site from HTTP to HTTPs, and several weeks afterwards I updated the status of traffic, page views, and time on site. Several weeks after moving I some pretty good results, which I believe was a result of my moving from HTTP to HTTPs. A year later, let’s look at what I’ve accomplished over the past year, and if we can tell if it was worth it to move.
The screen capture above compares the traffic on this site from August 7, 2014 to the current day with the same previous period (August 7, 2013 to August 14, 2014). As you can see, traffic is not as good as it was the previous year.
It looks like the sessions are down 34 percent and pageviews are down 23 percent. I attribute that to my blogging less in the past year due to family issues and my travel schedule the past 6 months. But, if you take a look at the pages per session and new sessions, those are UP. And, you can clearly see that the overall traffic to my blog decreased around January 2015, when I blogged less due to family issues and traveling so much. But, nonetheless, the results are interesting.
The pages per session is what I’ve been claiming all along: a move to HTTPs has, for some reason, caused visitors to view more pages per session.
What confuses me is the Average Session Duration and the Bounce Rate. Perhaps that could be due to moving to CloudFlare in the past year, I will need to look into that to see what’s causing the Average Session Duration to change so much, as well as the bounce rate.
But overall, I am very happy with moving to HTTPs, and I am glad I did it. As a result of going through it myself and experiencing all of the issues that arose before, during, and after the move, I’m able to advise clients about moving.
If you’re interested in moving or will be involved in moving to HTTPs, I’ve compiled a checklist here that you can use.