Does HTTPS Affect How Google Treats Websites?
I converted my Residential Architecture website to HTTPS just over a month ago as common opinion is that a secure website (one with the HTTPS prefix) was trusted more by Google. This trust should flow down as a better performing website statistically. I collected my website statistics on Google Search Console for the the month before I changed over and once the security certificate was issued I monitored how things were progressing on a daily basis.
The Result of Changing my Site from HTTP to HTTPS
The statistics showed a marked change in my website. Google was doing something differently now, but it didn’t seem to be good. I went from a position of 51.6 to 54.7 (which proved nothing) but my CTR went from 4.6% to 2.32%. My initial thoughts were grim. All that work and I had made things worse! A closer look however revealed that things weren’t so bad…. perhaps even good. What had caused the drop in Click Through Rate was just statistics. My impressions had doubled in the same time. Was Google giving me more love? Maybe not….I checked organic search terms and there was the answer. I had gone from 29 search terms to 60. My impressions had doubled because I had twice the search terms, not that my existing search terms were getting more impressions.
Did the Change to HTTPS Protocol Improve my Websites Performance with Google?
The answer seems to be YES…. at the moment anyway. I had been having difficulty being indexed for the terms I wanted to rank for such as “Adelaide Architect” and “Residential Architect”. The additional search terms that were added by Google over the month included the terms I had wanted but hadn’t previously had an indexing for. This was great news! It seems that the hard work was paying off after all!