I have recently Installed SSL certificate on my new wordpress site. I have added 301 redirection to redirect all the HTTP URLS to HTTPS URLS. However, if later on I plan to move back from HTTPS to HTTP (after my certificate expires), will it affect my SEO? Anyone experienced with SSL certificates?
Yes, if this will be a permanent change then you would suffer some 'trust' loss from Google. This would eventually mean loss in rankings. The whole point of introducing HTTPS was to serve trusted websites and then Google included this as a part of ranking algorithm. If you have HTTPS and Google evaluates your website, I am sure you will see benefits. However, those benefits will be taken back once your certificate expires and you decide to go back to HTTP.
Just re-new your SSL cert. every year or there is not much point in moving over to https in the first place. It's a more secure protocol that Google and user favour and trust.
hi, The problem occurs when you try to do a 301 or 302 redirect to an SSL URL (HTTPS URL) but the SSL certificate for that URL does not match the domain. It will throw a warning message saying the connection is untrusted or that there is a problem with the website’s security certificate in the user’s browser. Most users will come across on an HTTP connection such as and if needed, the network/web engineer would setup a web server or load balancer policy to perform the 301 redirect to The certificate in this case is valid for and will not throw an error. But what if the user somehow manages to go directly over an SSL connection? It would throw an error unless the certificate is valid for “domain.com” which is most cases it is not. Even if you had a wildcard certificate for “*.domain.com”, it would not prevent you from getting a warning because this specifies any subdomain is valid, but does not cover just the domain by itself. Your user will always get a warning message. You may think you could write a policy on your load balancer to do the redirect but that will not work. The reason is a TCP connection has to be established first and during the SSL handshake before the connection is fully established is when the user gets the warning. The policy will never run as a result until after the user accepts the warning message and the SSL handshake is completed.
Thanks a lot everyone for your useful feedback. That was really helpful. I have decided NOT to switch to SSL.