SSL on whole site

[feemish]

Because of the upcoming GDPR I decided it's time to go full SSL across the site.

I have an SSL certificate on my domain (AutoSSL from CPanel)

I ticked the Site wide SSL box in Business settings and uploaded the store to my test server (I cant give an URL because it is in a password protected area)

The shop pages are all now padlocked and look fine.
My problem is that 'add to cart' takes ages to happen... like a minute or two!
view cart and checkout
take absolutely ages to load... and sometimes never get there. On the non SSL site they load instantly. Has anyone experienced this and know why it is happening?

Cheers,
Mark

[Goz]

When the cart or checkout does finally appear, does it also have a green padlock? Or has it gone yellow? (I'm assumning FireFox..... other browsers are available and show it slightly differently).

[feemish]

Hi Goz,

Thanks for the interest.

When the cart eventually appears, the padlock is green (on firefox) it just takes ages. Same with the cart...

[gail]

I had a quick look at your site and noticed it is still http rather than https.

Is this still ongoing from the SSL problem?

[Goz]

I had a quick look at your site and noticed it is still http rather than https.

Is this still ongoing from the SSL problem?

It is his test site that is behind a password protected directory


Mark - can you take the password off for a while and test it. I'm wondering if the password protection is interfering with the scripts?

[Mike Hughes]

I've had my whole site on SSL for some time now and haven't seen anything like the problem your getting.

As Goz says, it might be some interaction between the password protection and the scripts / SSL. It might be fine when you go live.

Mike

[feemish]

Thanks for the interest guys!

I did a full purge and refresh of the pearl .cat and .fil files and it is now working at a satisfactory speed. So all good.

The only issue I have now is that the search results are not returned on a secure page.
Please see attached image. All other pages have a full green padlock.. Any ideas on how to track down the cause.

Goz- I can of course send you the password it you're willing to look.

[KieranSD]

Hi Mark,

I believe this might fall in line with an issue I have located.
If you press F12 whilst on the search page and press 'Console'
If there is an error about NETQUOTEVAR:THUMBNAIL then this is the fix I have used:

1. Go into Design | Library | Layouts
2. Press CTRL+F (Find)
3. Locate 'Standard Search Result List' (might need to do this for the RWD extension version).
4. Create a copy of the file before changing (Right Click | Copy)
5. Make the changes in the attached txt file

Hope this helps!

[feemish]

Thanks Kieron, yes that is the error that comes up. I will try the fix you suggest and report back. Cheers

[feemish]

Hi Mark,

I believe this might fall in line with an issue I have located.

Hope this helps!

Yes it did help! Search results now returned with a nice green padlock! thanks very much Kieron!

[feemish]

My live site is now switched to SSL and all seems to be working well.

I placed the redirect suggested by Jonathan on this thread into my htaccess file;
https://community.sellerdeck.com/showpost.php?p=355126&postcount=20
all is working well.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Is there anything else I should do in terms of SEO and Google?
I've seen some scary stories online.. it's all so confusing... stories of duplicate pages and drops in rankings. Should I change anything in Google Webmasters tools or anywhere else or is the above code sufficient to keep my page rankings.

Thanks

[KieranSD]

I would make sure in Google Webmasters (now 'Search Console') that you have all 4 versions of your site created (https, http, https://www., http://www.) and Google will send you a list of tasks to do once that is complete. For example setting your primary domain which for majority of sites I've worked on is 'https://www.'
It will also ask you upload a sitemap, which should be available at domain.com/sitemap.xml

As for .htaccess to fall in line with the above you could try forcing 'www' on the domain to make it more uniform. (This is optional)

Try the following:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.co.uk$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.domain\.co\.uk\/$1" [R=301,L]

[feemish]

Thanks again Kieran!

[feemish]

Hi all,

Everything seems to going ok in the move to https.

In 'search console' a couple of pages have been flagged up as response code 404.. however the pages that are flagged up are for deleted products, so they are no longer on the website. Could they still be being linked somewhere on the website, or is it more likely that customers are clicking on links they have saved before the items were deleted?

[MattSMR]

Hi all,

Everything seems to going ok in the move to https.

In 'search console' a couple of pages have been flagged up as response code 404.. however the pages that are flagged up are for deleted products, so they are no longer on the website. Could they still be being linked somewhere on the website, or is it more likely that customers are clicking on links they have saved before the items were deleted?

Bookmarks, history etc.

Set up a 301 redirect (http://www.visiospark.com/mod-rewrite-rule-generator/) and drop that in to your .htaccess file

Tell Search Console that you have fixed the issues - they will add it to a list to be re-crawled. Ensure you keep on top of these as they can be a negative factor for on-site SEO.