Important HTTPS-SSL Information on Redirects Through Site Domains

byJChrisA

4.7K followers

9 years ago

Hi, Everybody!

Some things just don't amount to enough to be made into training, but they are important nonetheless.

This is not related to 301 redirects, so we don't want to get them confused with site redirects, which is what this is about.

You may not be aware of this nifty little feature since Site Domains is still a relatively new part of WA, but when you select the Site Domains options under the main SiteRubix page, it takes you to a list of the domains you own (you don't actually own a siterubic.com domain, so any of those you are using will not appear there).

Not only does this page give you lots of great info on your domains, but at the far right for each domain is a settings button. Currently, the features available are:

Name Servers, Contact & Privacy, FTP Access, Renew, Domain Transfer...and, the subject of this post: the Redirect feature.

This allows you to take a domain that you own and set it up to automatically take your audience from the URL address to another URL address...immediately. For example, if you were to set one of your domains up to redirect immediately to another of your domains, then they in effect act as one site and you only need to build-out the features and content of that 2nd domain.

I won't go into the circumstances or advantages under which one might want to consider doing this, but simply as a preface to something I discovered today, regarding our new HTTPS/SSL feature.

Regardless of whether you have your "target site" (the one receiving the redirected traffic) set up for HTTP or HTTPS, you always set the redirected domain to go to the HTTP address of the 2nd site. Do not use HTTPS in your target address or it will not send your visitors anywhere except to a "site can't be reached" error page, and if they have certain types of security software in place, it will actually flag your site as malicious!

So now you know...hope that helps somebody, somewhere down the road :)

I'm following you all the way to success!