There’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether or not sites should move their sites from HTTP to HTTPs. In fact, there apparently was a study done that said that apparently proved that you should not move from HTTP to HTTPS because there’s no benefit. Well, all I can do is continue to report my specific results for this site, on www.BillHartzer.com, and show you my data.
Last week I reported, 3 weeks after moving from HTTP to HTTPs, that I still believe it’s beneficial. Well, to be honest with you, now I really think it’s beneficial to move from HTTP to HTTPS, especially after 4 weeks, one month after moving, I’m still seeing positive results.
Let’s look at the data, and you can decide for yourself:
You will need to click on the image above, as it’s easier to see the data in the larger version. There’s a lot of green there, which is positive:
Sessions up 9.56 percent.
Users up 11.01 percent.
Pageviews up 93.91 percent
Pages Per Session up 76.99 percent.
Average session duration up 8.67 percent.
But, what’s important to note is the Google organic search traffic. Let’s take a look at that:
For Google Organic traffic:
Sessions up 11.06 percent.
Percentage of new sessions down only 1.17 percent.
New Users up 9.15 percent.
Bounce Rate up 67.61 percent
Pages Per Session Up 74.70 percent
Average Session Duration Up 25.19 percent.
So, to be honest with you, this is telling me that it’s a positive thing: moving from HTTP to HTTPs. There are more visitors, but that’s not all. Those visitors are viewing twice as many pages as they did before. They’re spending more time on the site.
Maybe because those users trust the site more, considering that it’s on HTTPS now?