Moving to https, pain expected?

[EvanGR]

[J2.5.28 + VM 2.6.18]

Hello,

What kind of pain is expected by moving an existing VM site over to https?

Doing pre-planning currently, and want to identify areas of potential trouble.

Thanks you

[GJC Web Design]

have done a few on both VM2 & 3 and have had no problems

Just set Joomla force SSL everywhere

[Nilu]

If you are moving to https just for SEO benefit then don't do it because no one got ranking boost till date after moving to https....

[GJC Web Design]

and there is the negative performance hit to consider as well

[AH]

Also remember to do a site wide 301 redirect from http to https  as google sees the https pages as separate from http pages

If you don't you will lose all your existing rankings

[EvanGR]

Thank you all.

@AH

Any example on how to do this from .htaccess? I have some code that adds the www. to the URL (if missing), that might take care of it I am not sure. When I go to the products from a google search, they land correctly on the https page.

[AH]

Evan

You are best to use google to find examples of how to do this

[EvanGR]

I used Joomla's own "Force SSL" option. This seems to handle the redirects automatically (http addresses change to https). Which is why I found your post curious and had to ask if there was a better way.

Regarding the topic of this thread, I switched a website to https with only minor issues. Any templates/extensions which use http to fetch external data, should switch to https.

For anyone wanting to offer both http and https versions of the website, you may need to create separate entries for each version in google webmaster tools. As AH also posted, http and https pages are considered different by Google.

[AH]

Have you checked to see if this option is doing a redirect as 301  "moved permanently"

https://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/6646

[GJC Web Design]

sadly it appears not

gives a 303 other on my test

joomla site wide force ssl.. test with a non https url

perhaps someone with more patience than me can tell us HOW you get the 2 patched files out of such an unintuitive bollocks like github?

https://issues.joomla.org/tracker/joomla-cms/6646

[AH]

would be easier and more persistent to do it in an .htaccess file

[jenkinhill]

Somethink like:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
# First rewrite to HTTPS:
# Don't put www. here. If it is already there it will be included, if not
# the subsequent rule will catch it.
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
# Now, rewrite any request to the wrong domain to use www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule .* https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

[AH]

Unless of course you choose not to use WWW in your domain - as preferred by many sites

Then you need a different rewrite rule :-)