HTTPS as an SEO Ranking Factor

Why is switching from HTTP to HTTPS an SEO advantage?

It has now been several years since Google, back in August 2014, announced that serving a site over HTTPS would become a ranking factor for search results. The news was shared by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes (Webmaster Trends Analysts) on the Google blog, and later confirmed by John Mueller via Google Plus.

Google's original statement read:

"We've begun using HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal, affecting fewer than 1% of global queries... But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we'd like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."

Since then, a lot has changed. In recent years, Google has started sending explicit warnings to website owners connected to Search Console, notifying them that pages served over HTTP would be flagged as "not secure."

As mentioned, Google is now using HTTPS as a ranking criterion, and it's fairly clear that sites certified as secure will be given greater visibility in search results.

This raises several questions that keep search engine optimization specialists wondering whether HTTPS is truly a factor that can boost a site's visibility on Google. Which brings us back to our opening point: yes, HTTPS is a ranking signal. And it is one in the sense that it can give a site an edge over another within the complex set of factors that determine search rankings. To be clear, if your site isn't optimized, if you've used risky SEO tactics, if its structure is a mess, if it lacks quality content, if it isn't mobile responsive, and so on, HTTPS alone certainly won't save you. But if your website development is executed flawlessly, HTTPS will also count among the elements to consider in an SEO strategy.

So, what happens next?

There's no way to know for sure — as always, Google remains full of surprises, especially in the SEO space, and for now it's still too early to make predictions.

Where Things Stand Today

Years on from that original announcement, the practical situation is much simpler than the SEO debate around it: HTTPS is no longer optional or a marginal ranking edge — it is the baseline. Chrome has marked plain-HTTP pages as "Not secure" directly in the address bar since Chrome 68, released in July 2018, and every other major browser followed with similar warnings shortly after. A site still served over HTTP today isn't just missing out on a small ranking signal — it's actively telling visitors, in the browser UI itself, that the connection isn't safe, which affects trust and conversions independently of any SEO impact at all.

What a Correct HTTP → HTTPS Migration Actually Involves

The ranking impact of HTTPS depends entirely on how the migration is executed — a botched one can hurt visibility far more than staying on HTTP ever would. The elements that matter in practice:

• A valid, correctly renewed certificate. Automated issuance and renewal (Let's Encrypt or an equivalent ACME-based provider) avoids the classic failure mode of a certificate expiring unnoticed, which browsers treat as a hard security error.
• 301 redirects from every HTTP URL to its HTTPS equivalent, not a generic redirect to the homepage — losing the original URL path in the redirect is one of the most common ways sites lose their existing rankings during migration.
• Updating internal links, canonical tags, and the sitemap to the HTTPS versions. Leaving internal links pointing to HTTP forces an unnecessary extra redirect hop on every click.
• Fixing mixed content — images, scripts, or stylesheets still loaded over HTTP from an HTTPS page, which browsers block or flag and which can silently break page functionality.
• Adding the HTTPS property in Search Console alongside (not instead of) the HTTP one, so you can see the migration reflected in indexing and traffic data rather than assuming it went smoothly.
• Enabling HSTS once the migration is stable, so browsers refuse to load the site over HTTP at all in the future, closing the door on that failure mode permanently.

There's also a technical benefit to HTTPS that has nothing to do with the ranking signal itself: HTTP/2, the protocol version that lets a browser fetch multiple resources over a single connection instead of opening several in parallel, is in practice only supported over HTTPS by every major browser, even though the underlying specification doesn't strictly require it. A site still on HTTP is therefore also missing out on the performance gains of HTTP/2 — and page speed is a ranking factor in its own right, independent of the HTTPS signal discussed above.