When a site has thousands of pages and real traffic.
BEFORE
Take a full backup and verify it Record current rankings and traffic for comparison Choose a quiet period Prepare a rollback plan
THE SEQUENCE
- Issue the certificate and verify it covers every hostname in use.
- Test on a staging copy: search and replace, redirects, mixed content.
- On the live site, update the application site address.
- Run the database search and replace.
- Enable the redirect.
- Immediately check the homepage, key landing pages and any transactional flow.
- Fix mixed content found in the console.
- Update the sitemap and submit it in Search Console.
MONITORING AFTERWARDS
Search Console crawl errors daily for a fortnight Traffic and rankings weekly for a month Server error logs for redirect problems
EXPECT
A short fluctuation in rankings while pages are recrawled. Recovery within weeks if the redirects are correct.
THE THINGS THAT CAUSE LASTING DAMAGE
Missing redirects for some URL patterns Redirect chains Canonical tags left pointing at http Blocking https in robots.txt by accident
