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
Recent Comments
17
Interesting point about the SSL.
As far as the facebook likes are concerned, that wouldn't worry me so much as they are the equivalent of a smile in real life, the Google Ranking would bother me more, but sometimes we have to accept slight bumps in the road, when we are convinced the initial decision, as you made is better long term
Given that WA is a Google Ranked sight, the rankings shouldn't be affected too much, I wouldn't have thought.
I don't know what her stats are as far as Google ranking, but she targets mainly social media, especially Facebook, for getting her posts out. The social share count was a good indicator of how many people were actually reading her posts, because it isn't just a like button, they show how many people have actually shared the article with their friends. So that metric is very important to her, even though the social share count indicator is largely viewed as a "vanity metric."
No worries! I think your point that Google rankings are more important overall is spot on, especially as it pertains to affiliate marketing. Her blog site features ads, but it's not really affiliate oriented. That viral post of hers I mentioned did lead to a little bit of revenue from Google Adsense though.
So here's an update: going by ericcantu's recommendation, I disabled SSL to revert to http. This fixes the problem with the share count. Of course the drawback is that disabling SSL has it's disadvantages of not ranking as well in Google due to the site being less trusted/secure. We'll probably roll with it as it is for now (no SSL), then reactivate SSL at a later time when we can justify spending the higher dollar amount for the plugin fix.
Sorry to hear this, what an issue to overcome. Depends on so many factors out of your control. Thank you for the heads up!
SSL is something you're able to turn on or off. It's not a mandatory thing to have it. Just go to your SiteManager and click on the site you're wanting to turn it off for, click on Details, and then just hit the switch on SSL to off :)
Contact Wealthy Affiliate technical support & they can redirect your http to https for you by going into the server. You own the domain, so there's most certainly a work around to that.
Either that, or turn it off just like ericcantu said.
Yeah, I've been in contact with WA tech support. They're very responsive, but there's too much involved with trying to get the Really Simple SSL Social plugin going. For whatever reason, my wife's Wordpress backend isn't as easy to make adjustments to html, so for now I'm disabling SSL, and will reenable it when we can justify spending $96/year for the Shareaholic premium features.
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Thank you! This was very useful! I want to transfer my site to WA and it is the same thing: from http to https . Like you, I believe that in the long run this is a good decision and after reading your post, I know that I have to hurry now :).