Is it good to enable SSL for a blog?

People say Google give higher preference to SSL enabled websites. Now cloudflare have offered free SSL to everyone. My question is, I have a blog… Should I enable SSL for my blog? Is it a good idea?

Yes. It won’t have any effect on performance or anything like that. According to Google, everything should have SSL enabled. I can’t say I agree with that, but there’s no harm in it.

2 Likes

Great thanks… One question… If I enable HTTPS, and if I don’t force all HTTP requests to redirect to HTTPS, will that be a problem? Duplicate content?

What people? What evidence have they got for saying this?

It’s true that Google has said they will use the protocol (http vs https) as a signal in search engine ranking, but they also said it will be a very minor signal affecting a tiny minority of searches. They said it might be more important in the future, but I for one seriously doubt that it will ever be signficant.

If you really want to go to the trouble of enabling SSL, and if it really is free (or very low cost), then you might as well. As Mawburn said, it won’t do any harm. Personally, I can think of a dozen things I can do to improve SEO performance that will be more valuable.

Mike

1 Like

My answer is NO, unless you need to authenticate your users. You can have your administration panel on HTTPS but having static resources on HTTPS without a security reason will affect your performance and it will not bring you any benefits. HTTPS is used for encryption, to avoid MIM attacks and to make sure a request is only validated by the server. If you have a blog with static images and articles that have media content and everything is public, as a regular blog is, using SSL not only useless but will make your server think more without reason.

Read more here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https-performance
or here

or make a simple google search about “http vs https static resources performance”

You have a point, but you’re talking about micro-optimization here. Completely optimizing all your resources and moving everything to a CDN would give better performance, but as long as that’s done you’re already serving up static content which is already going to feel blazingly fast compared to something with a backend and pulling from a db.

Plus, most blogs are considered “Dynamic Content” if they run any of the popular CMSs.

To me, micro-SEO for a blog would trump page speed micro-optimization. Especially if you’re dealing with static pages. I wouldn’t say go out and buy a SSL Cert, but like he said, Cloudfare gives them away on their free accounts now.

Personally, I don’t like to develop redundant things - don’t dig with dynamite when you can use a shovel :slight_smile:
Another article about why HTTPS should be used when needed.

Now, programming and engineering is about decisions, we all have own ideas about how things should be.

I think you should improve UI friendly to mobile, it’s important point that rank higher than enable ssl.

2 Likes