Traffic is down after HTTPS switch.. WTF !!
 

I recently moved all the sites on the server to https and now when I look at my webstats, i see 0 traffic on the sites..
anybody else experience the same thing ?

I just did a thread on it and no one answered me. I have a bunch of sites running chaturbate and other things and once I did the https switch on the server--on each site, revenue went down 70 percent.

what webstats are you tracking? make sure you update whatever it is to https.
+ its normal to have a huge drop in traffic for a few days/weeks after a move (even if done properly)
and there are a lot of things that can go wrong wtih a move to https.

Most "big" websites are now https, so if you have an ongoing problem there must be some other "glitch"..,:2 cents:

+1.................

Like I said in another thread: I did the SSL on all sites except one or two. Still did campaigns on the newly converted https:// sites, no money. Did similar campaign on regular non converted site and money came in. And this is with Chaturbate scripts.

And I did new sitemaps with https and Google Webmaster tools. Maybe it's just a fluke...

Revenue and traffic are two different beasts, so did your traffic fall off after switching over to a secure version of your website ? Or did your revenue to a particular program fall off ?

If your revenue fell off, that's a lot harder to piece what might have happened, for instance if your buying traffic, but have a small amount of SE traffic, maybe the traffic your buying is shit, and it's only the organic traffic that is really doing any sales. If that is the case you would have to really dig down on your GA to see if SE traffic fell off after the switch. Whenever you make changes to your sites, you need to give it 60 days to balance back out before freaking out :Oh crap

So it would take a lot more details than either of you gave to diagnose what may have happened, and I wouldn't suggest that you give out that info here on an open forum. Find someone that you trust and let them look at your numbers to see if they can spot what may be up :)

Make sure that there are no insecure links:
* Open the browser console and check for errors.
* Check that the stylesheets and scripts are available on the site (even if the links were relative)
* Check the links in Javascript plugins and SDKs. Some will ignore the SSL and try to obtain resources from http.
* All iFrames should be https, so check that they are valid.
* Do you have a wildcard SSL? If not, the 301 redirections will not work properly.

Other things:
* Validate the SSL. If there is some warnings, it can cause errors on certain browsers.
* Check the site speed.

This exact same thing has happened to me as well and it sucks because I switched over to https because my traffic was down, so it went even further down..

I did some research into it and found that this is actually quite normal - at least for the short term.

Are all of your pages secure with the green lock or do some have the yellow (amber?) unlocked lock? If so, you have to make sure everything that loads on your page is also https. This includes ALL images (If you are loading from a source that is not https, your page will not be). This also include IFRAMES.

I am currently going through 3600+ different posts and manually switching the images, it's such a huge fucking pain in the shitter let me tell you, I can't do a search and replace because they are all unique and instead of loading from the source I am loading off my website since it's https. Everything is nice after I do the edit.

Some other things to consider.

Did you set up 301 redirects AT THE SERVER LEVEL in the .htaccess file? This is most important from what I read. Much better doing this than tons of individual 301 redirects.

Why do you need 301 redirects?? Because http and https are two different websites, at least to search engines. They will see it as duplicate content and give a slight penalty unless you 301.

I used this code in the .htaccess file. I have no knowledge of Apache or .htaccess but after researching this shit I found this and it works fantastic. It redirects http to https and also www to non-www, all in one

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

Again, not 100% sure if this is the proper way but from my research into it, it seems to be. Also, it works.

http, https, www . yoursite.com and yoursite . com are all different websites in the eyes of search engines, so unless you set it up 301's they will see it as duplicate content. On top of that, if you use WordPress it will also duplicate content up to 6 times per post. 6 x 4 = 24 duplicates of every post of content. YOAST SEO plugin helps with this greatly with the extra 6 WordPress dupes and lots more, plus it's free.

Anyways, from what I've seen people say you WILL see a drop in traffic even if you set up everything 100% perfectly as it takes a while for the search engines to adjust. Some people say days, some say weeks, some say a month or two.

I hope some of what I wrote is helpful,

Good luck :)

I experienced the same traffic drop with my clients when switching to HTTPS.
But it's temporary only. Then, traffic increases better than before.
Make sure you do not miss any steps of SSL migration process.

Google traffic will come back.
If you miss referer-traffic, you should make sure to have

<meta name="referrer" content="origin" />

added. So the script at traffic partners will recognize your sent traffic via https, too.

Just do not forget to add 301 redirections from http to https pages! Otherwise search engines could find duplicate content and you'll get penalized.

Also check if your website is working both http and https.

There is a plugin that checks all the errors when going to HTTPS, it just spotted it in the plugin area. Not sure if that will help you or anyone else.

Some crap/old scripts doesnt recognize traffic via https even with meta name origin.... (at3, atx etc)

https will benefit you greatly in the long run

It took about a month but traffic picked up even more after switching to https.