Move from HTTP to HTTPS: Google Traffic 1 Week After Moving

Exactly one week ago, I moved my site from HTTP to HTTPS, making my whole entire site serve up content securely. As you may recall, Google officially came out and said that HTTPS is a search engine ranking signal now. One week after I moved the site, here is an update. Overall, traffic from Google organic search is up 9.58 percent. And the overall quality of the traffic is much better, as well.

Here are some stats from Google Analytics for the past week. I compared the period August 7, 2014 to August 14, 2014 with July 30, 2014 to August 6, 2014.

— Overall Sessions are up 9.58 percent.

— Percent of New Sessions is down 0.4 percent.

— New Users are up 9.14 percent.

— Bounce rate went from 88 percent to 32 percent.

— Pages per session is up 81 percent. People are viewing more pages on the site.

What’s even more interesting, though, is the data that’s being reported in Google Webmaster Tools – from the search query report:

The average position for all keywords that I rank for in Google organic search is up 10.54 percent.

Serving up HTTPS secure content on your website is not really a part of the algorithm that has to “run” at a certain time. Rather, it’s a search engine ranking factor that’s applied immediately–like PageRank, anchor text, keywords in a title tag, keywords in a heading tag, and soforth. So, once you move your site from HTTP to HTTPS you should start seeing search engine ranking increases fairly quickly.

At this point, one week after moving my site (this site) from HTTP to HTTPS, my search engine rankings are up 10.54 percent. So, should you move from HTTP to HTTPS? Absolutely. At least that’s my take