Should I go ahead with SSL certificates?

1

Hello guys, I have recently gone ahead with SSL certificates for one of my websites https://onlinecoursesgalore.com
And, honestly speaking it was quite a headache… getting all the links to redirect, making no link is lost… It really was quite tiresome…
Now I have another website which is quite big http://trydiscountcoupons.com It has atleast thousand links, I was just thinking, should I or should I not upgrade it to https…

I have heard that Google and Apple both prefer https version of a website over http. Google is still soft but Apple is quite strict on this… What do you suggest guys? Kindly leave your input below…

3

In Apache/Linux, you can use .htaccess file and RewriteRule to force https connection.

1 Like
4

I have a linux based web server for both sites, I took me a lot of time to fix the hard coded links. Tough, adding https to all pages didn’t take much time, all i did was, went to my CMS(Wordpress) settings, replaced the prefix from http to https… Off course it was possible only after installing the SSL certificates to my server…

5

True, i did that for my first website and it worked well…Only tiresome thing was to fix the hard coded urls and the images…

6

I don’t get it. Didn’t you code your files like this?
The URLs and images in your html would just be :

<a href="/dir/filename.php"> <img src="/images/logo.jpg"> </a>
3 Likes
7

:thumbsup: Thumbs up for going http/s :smiley:
Look into redirecting at the server (apache, nginx), or even dns level. It might save you some trouble :smile:

Also, here are some great resource just in case you haven’t found them already:

  1. Mozilla SSL Configuration Generator
  2. QUALYS SSL Server Test
2 Likes
8

Unfortunately, for some reason, Wordpress doesn’t do that but uses absolute links instead. I just moved to https and found out the hard way. At least it was just a find/replace in the DB.

1 Like
10

use cli tools to replace http with https in your sources, basically any repetitive substring with a new one

11

When you need to refer to outside content or manually add links to yours, you can write them without the protocol and it will still work. Eg. //ebm.si/en instead of http(s)://ebm.si/en. That way any change to the protocol won’t incur a need to change the url. Especially helpful if, for some reason, you decide to go back to http.

edit: heh, even discourse recognised it. :slight_smile: