Is HTTPS Better for SEO?

We started recommending HTTPS to clients not long after Google confirmed it as a ranking signal in August 2014. Not because it was a major mover at the time. That signal stuck. Nineteen years of work as an SEO expert Calgary businesses rely on confirms it.

A client asked us that year whether switching was worth the effort. Our answer was yes. The plain version in 2026 is more specific. HTTPS matters for SEO. It also matters for browser trust and analytics accuracy. Each effect is different in size, however.

The protocol does lift rankings. That part is modest. The bigger returns show up in user behaviour and how accurately your analytics reflect where sessions are coming from.

What Makes HTTPS Different from HTTP

Two letters. One meaningful difference.

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Plain-text data transfer, no protection built in. A web server responds to page requests with readable output. Anyone intercepting that connection reads it in full. Login credentials exposed. Form submissions readable. Payment details unprotected in transit.

HTTPS adds an SSL certificate and TLS encryption to protect the transfer. Everything moving between the server and a user’s browser gets scrambled in both directions. Intercepted, it is useless.

HTTPS also authenticates the server. Your browser verifies that the SSL certificate belongs to the domain you are visiting. A third party cannot serve a fake version of a legitimate site without a valid certificate for that domain. That is the integrity layer on top of encryption.

Most people still say SSL certificates. The actual protocol is TLS now. SSL was formally deprecated years ago. The certificate still gets issued and installed the same way. That shorthand has stuck.

Chrome used to show a green padlock for HTTPS sites. That changed in 2018. Now unencrypted sites get a “Not secure” label in the address bar. HTTPS shows nothing. The absence of a warning is the trust signal.

HTTPS as a Google Ranking Signal

2014 was the announcement.

The confirmation came in August 2014. Their security blog described it as lightweight, affecting less than 1% of global queries at launch. The post also stated the signal would strengthen over time.

That happened. The search engine began indexing secure versions preferentially. By 2018, treating it as the canonical URL was standard. Webmasters who had not set up 301 redirects found the secure version chosen regardless.

Treat it as a tiebreaker. Give two sites equal content quality. Equal on backlinks. Same technical health. The secure site comes out ahead.

How much does it actually move rankings?

Hard to isolate. Most migrations to HTTPS happen alongside other technical cleanup. Redirect chains get fixed. Canonicals get reviewed. Site speed gets addressed. Still, the measured contribution from HTTPS alone is small. A few positions on mid-competition queries. On high-competition terms, even less.

The more direct concern is the downside of staying unencrypted. Chrome labels every HTTP page as “Not secure” in the address bar. That label loads before any content. On a contact form page, the warning appears before the headline. Pay for Google Ads campaign management and those paid clicks arrive on a page that opens with a security warning. That is a conversion problem.

What HTTPS Does for Your Site Beyond Rankings

Referral data surprises clients most.

Chrome warnings and user trust

Chrome 68 in 2018 extended the “Not secure” flag to all unencrypted pages. Not just login pages or checkout flows. The flag shows on every page, every visit.

Not every user reads it consciously. Studies through 2019 and 2020 tracked higher bounce rates on unencrypted landing pages. Compared to equivalent HTTPS pages, the difference was measurable even when content was identical. The warning still sits in the address bar on every page load.

For e-commerce sites, the risk is direct. Visitors entering credit card numbers on an unencrypted page are exposed. Some users know that. Most do not. Users who spot the warning will not complete the purchase.

Referral data and what the old protocol costs you

HTTPS preserves referral headers when requests pass between secure pages. The old protocol does not, however.

Here is what that means. A user on an HTTPS site clicks a link to your unencrypted page. The source attribution strips in transit. Google Analytics records that session as direct traffic with no source attached. The visitor arrived from somewhere. You cannot see where.

Run your site without HTTPS long enough. The direct channel inflates. Social referrals show as direct. Links from other sites show as direct. Organic clicks from HTTPS pages also show as direct. After a year of this, it becomes hard to tell which channels are actually driving visits.

What Goes Wrong When Switching to HTTPS

Two problems dominate. Both are fixable.

Mixed content issues

Mixed content is what happens when an HTTPS page loads resources from unencrypted sources. Images with old URLs still stored in the database. Scripts or stylesheets pointing to the old address. Browsers block or flag those requests. Chrome drops the padlock. The trust signal the switch was supposed to deliver gets immediately undercut.

WordPress sites hit this most often. The database stores image and media URLs from before the migration. A search-and-replace across the database updates them. The Better Search Replace plugin handles it without code edits.

Check Google Search Console after the migration. The Security and Manual Actions section surfaces mixed content warnings. Fix each one before they accumulate.

301 redirects and where the setup goes wrong

Every unencrypted URL needs a 301 redirect to its HTTPS version. Without it, two versions of the same site run simultaneously. The search engine indexes whichever it crawls first. Link equity splits between them. Referral traffic that hits the unencrypted version strips source data on arrival.

.htaccess handles this for Apache in a single rule. Nginx uses a server block. WordPress plugin redirects work adequately. Server-level redirects are faster and less error-prone.

Also update internal links on your site to use secure URLs directly. This avoids redirect hops on every internal click and keeps link equity clean. Verify in Search Console after setup that the HTTPS versions are indexing. Expect a few weeks for full recrawl on most sites.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is HTTPS important for SEO?

Confirmed ranking factor since 2014. The boost alone is modest, however. Content quality and backlinks move rankings more. What it addresses directly is the warning users encounter on unencrypted sites. “Not secure” loads in the address bar on every HTTP page visit, before content appears. That trust signal matters. Treat HTTPS as a baseline requirement, not a differentiator. Focus remaining work on what actually moves rankings.

Which URL is SEO friendly?

HTTPS with a canonical pointing to the preferred version. Most sites settle on one canonical format and 301-redirect the other variants. The plain unencrypted URL variants also need redirecting. Four total versions exist for most domains. One canonical. Three redirecting to it. Lowercase throughout your site. Hyphens instead of underscores. No unnecessary parameters in the URL string. The protocol is one piece of a clean URL structure.

Does HTTPS affect page speed?

Minor latency from the TLS handshake in older configurations. HTTP/2 more than compensates. The protocol requires HTTPS to work. It loads multiple resources over one connection simultaneously. Most current hosting stacks enable HTTP/2 by default. Net effect is neutral to slightly positive for most sites. The handshake latency is smaller than the HTTP/2 efficiency gain.

A website SEO audit at To-The-TOP! covers HTTPS status in the first technical pass. Leaving it unaddressed slows down the rest of the work. Foundational gaps compound.

Work from an SEO service in Calgary starts with the technical layer. Search engine optimization takes months of consistent effort. The protocol question is the easy part. Call (403) 308-5949 or reach out through to-the-top.ca if you want a straight read on where your technical foundation stands.