A Word of Caution Prior to Transferring a Site to Wealthy Affiliate

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to transfer my wife's blogsite over to hosting here at Wealthy Affiliate. I believe in the long run, this is the correct decision, considering that I can host up to 25 owned-domains through my premium membership. That said, I want to tell everybody about one major issue we have encountered through the transition that we are still battling to fix.

http vs https

My wife's site was previously http. Wealthy Affiliate features SSL certificates that are applicable to all hosted sites. This is very attractive from both a security standpoint and a Google ranking standpoint. HOWEVER, this is also where our current troubles are rooted. You see, when you migrate a site from http to https, the simple addition of the "s" character creates a new URL. Social media sites recognize the different URL as a different website altogeter DESPITE the fact that the domain is the same.

So, what does that mean? It means that when you update from http to https you will lose your likes and your share counts. In the case of my wife, she had a viral post from 2 years ago that lost over 100,000 Facebook shares. Recovering those and adding them to the current share count is the battle we are facing.

Don't get me wrong on this. NONE of this is Wealthy Affiliate's fault. Like I previously mentioned, I strongly believe migrating her site here was the right move, and to those that may have http sites hosted outside Wealthy Affiliate, be aware that Google is forcing a transition to https by favoring https sites over http sites in search result rankings... so if you haven't faced this situation yet, it is likely that you WILL eventually.

Recovery Options?

The good news is that there seem to be some recovery options. The easiest option (and also the most expensive option) would be for us to pay $96 annually to her social plugin (Shareaholic) to be able to access their premium share recovery feature. We're currently testing a less expensive plugin (Really Simple SSL with Really Simple SSL Social Add-On) which is $20 annually. We have figured out how to make this display the old share counts, but it doesn't seem to merging the new shares with the old; i.e. so far it's an either-or scenario.

Hopefully I've saved some of you some headache. At the very least, maybe this post will help some of you know what to expect if you're transferring an http site over to https. Plus, for those of you in a niche related to technology/web development, it seems that some of these share-recovery plugins offer affiliate programs.

Thanks for reading!

Josh