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HTTPS is a protocol for secure communication over computer networks and is widely used on the Internet. More and more website owners are migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, mainly due to the following 5 reasons:

1. Google announced that websites using HTTPS will receive a slight ranking priority in Google searches.
2. Thanks to browser support, we can achieve faster performance using the new HTTP/2 protocol, which requires HTTPS.
3. HTTPS is more secure and your visitor's data is fully encrypted.
4. HTTPS establishes trust by enabling the green lock icon in the address bar of your visitor's web browser.
5. If someone visits the site from HTTPS and goes to the HTTP site, the referral data will be lost in Google Analytics. It often ends up being lumped in with “direct traffic.” If someone goes from one HTTPS site to another HTTPS site, the referral data is still passed on. So by migrating from HTTP to HTTPS, we can actually get more accurate referral data.

How to redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Having said so much, how to redirect HTTP to HTTPS? There are three specific methods:

• Redirect HTTP to HTTPS in Nginx
• Redirect HTTP to HTTPS in Apache
• Redirect HTTP to HTTPS using Really Simple SSL plugin

Note: Our examples all include 301 redirect instructions, which is the correct way to implement it in terms of SEO. Using different types of redirects may have different effects on your site’s rankings.

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS in Nginx

According to W3Techs, Nginx is the fastest growing web server, with over 30% market share as of 2017. On average, one in the top 10 million websites starts using Nginx every minute.

If your web server is running Nginx, you can easily redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS by adding the following code to your Nginx configuration file. This is the recommended way to redirect websites running on Nginx.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name jiyik.com www.jiyik.com;
    return 301 https://jiyik.com$request_uri;
}

Jiyike uses this method to redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS in Apache

If your web server is running Apache, you can .htaccesseasily redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS by adding the following code to your ./configure/redirect/file. This is the recommended way to redirect websites running on Apache.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS using Really Simple SSL plugin

The third option we have to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS if the website is developed using WordPress is to use the free Really Simple SSL plugin for WordPress .

We do not recommend this method as a permanent solution, as 3rd party plugins always introduce another layer of issues and compatibility problems. Also, for HTTPS migrations, we should update the HTTP URLs in the database instead of relying on plugins. But this can be a good temporary solution.

The plugin has over 200,000 active installations and is maintained by developer Rogier Lankhorst. We can download Really Simple SSL from the WordPress repository or search for it under “Add New” plugins in the WordPress dashboard. Here is a list of the plugin’s features:

• All incoming HTTPS requests are redirected from HTTP to HTTPS. Use .htaccess if possible, otherwise use JavaScript.
• The WordPress site URL and homepage URL are changed to HTTPS.
• Insecure content was fixed by replacing all HTTP:// URLs with HTTPS://, except for links pointing to other external domains. Everything was done dynamically. No other database changes were made except for the WordPress site URL and homepage URL.

There are really no steps to using this plugin, just install it and click “Continue, Activate SSL” and you’re done.