Hi, everyone, have a little dilemma and was hoping to get some advice here. I recently installed a new SSL (3 months ago) to force our URL to start with https://. The site was earlier accessible through https:// and http:// prefix however now I have made it so that all urls are redirected to the correct https:// version. The problem is that direct traffic has dropped by more than 50% after implementing these changes and I can for the life of me figure out why.
Why would the direct traffic drop all of sudden after making these changes? I am starting to suspect that the earlier data was inflated and that Google analytics was counting users coming from a http:// version of the URL to a https:// version of the URL was counted as direct traffic. Could that be it? Any other possible causes?
Would really appreciate any guidance on this problem.
Ad blocking browser extensions and other privacy extensions are increasing in popularity so depending where your audience is that can decrease what Google Analytics reports.
Maybe you’re right and while both versions (http and https) were live, traffic looked doubled. But if you did your redirections right, I think that Google would be smart enough to know that.
Something that might be worth to check is the loading time and also use some kind of software for blind people o speech software. Because spiders read websites in a similar way, it might give you a clue if your site has some accessibility issue after moving it to https protocol