I’ve always thought of myself as a tech savvy type of guy. A long time ago I built some websites and messed with coding, and I’m always messing around with new tech. One of the things about owning my own business is that I try to do most things on my own. Just recently I learned that I needed to make a change to my website. There’s a new security protocol and websites are needing to change from http to https. I’m not going to go into all the details about the why or even the how, but switching a website to https is important and can also be a big pain.
Switching a website to Https
I spent a good chunk of my weekend switching two websites over to https. Both have brought about different challenges. This website, my wedding website, is hosted by Creative Motion Design, and they did most of the transition for me. I still found, though, that there were some errors. When you switch to https, it’s like making a new site. That means that all old links using http have to be changed. I had a bunch of images and links on my blog that were no longer working, so I had to go back in and just change the link to https. It’s not really hard, but it did take some time.
The second site, my senior site, was a different issue. I had to do the whole process myself. The first step was getting a SSL certificate to create a https site. Then I had to write some code in a .httaccess file to make sure only my https site showed up. Then the real issue showed up. My site was no longer running the way it was supposed to. The menu and everything were messed up. Lucky for me, Creative Motion Design was willing to help out. They fixed the computer version, but I’m still having issues with the mobile side.
With all that said, I think switching a website to https is something important to do. It makes your site more secure, and it should help out some with your Google ranking. My suggestion would be to read up on the process before you go jumping in, make a backup of your website, and if you have any doubts, find a professional to do it for you.
