A few months ago, I decided to switch my hosting provider from Arvixe to SmarterASP.net and after the switch I decided not to continue to use SSL for my site, so I terminated my SSL certificate. Within a week, I noticed that my page views have dropped tremendously, almost to single digit. After some investigation I noticed that Google still indexes my site as HTTPS instead of HTTP, even though I don’t have SSL certificate installed, as a result, all links to my site in Google search results are broken, causing the ranking of my site in Google search to drop to the bottom.
In order to get my site’s ranking back to where it was, I tried different techniques that I could find online, such as reindexing the whole site via Google, route rewriting, and adding rules in .htaccess or web.config (I am using Windows hosting platform), but none of them seemed to work because two months later, Google was still indexing my HTTP site as HTTPS and my page views were still very low. I believe you understand my frustration.
When I was on the edge of complete desperation and was thinking of purchasing a new SSL certificate, I came across to a company called CloudFlare, and the service it provides saved my site.
CloudFlare not only provides services to improve your website’s performance by accelerating the page load of your website, but also provides a free SSL certificate to protect your website. Unbelievable, right? What is even more unbelievable is that all these services are included even in the free plan they offer. This picture below shows how CloudFlare works:
You may ask, does it mean I have to switch to CloudFlare to host my website? The answer is no, you keep your website hosted where it is. All you need to do is to change your website’s DNS address to point to CloudFlare’s DNS, and CloudFlare will automatically reroute your web traffic to your hosting server as shown below:
Now my site is using CloudFlare’s service which not only optimizes my website’s performance, but also has fixed the broken links to my site in Google search results because of the SSL certificate from CloudFlare. If you are experiencing the same issue as me, I highly recommend you to give CloudFlare a try.