Google recently enabled
SSL Encryption for Blogger platform after implementing HTTPS on its other products. But many people worrying about
How to Enable HTTPS for Blogger Blog Custom Domain. That's why I am providing below detailed post at here.
How to Enable HTTPS for Blogger Blog Custom Domain
Google is always considering websites security as its top priority. And announced HTTPS is the main ranking factor for websites through
HTTPS Everywhere campaign in the year 2014. Already Google implemented
HTTPS for its products including
Google Adsense. Now Google announced free
HTTPS option for Blogger platform.
What is HTTPS?
For this answer first we need to check about
HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). This is a simple protocol to transfer data between your browser and the websites which is in text format. And here
HTTPS is a secure version of
HTTP. Here 'S' stands for the word Secure. The full abbreviation is
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure appears in the URL when a website is secured by a Secure Socket Layer (
SSL) certificate.
Benefits of using HTTPS on Blog: You can get lot of benefits after shifting to https from http
- According to latest Ranking Algorithms, Google conform that they will rank https sites over http. So if you use SSL then your blog will get good ranking
- HTTPS will be helpful for browser to check whether the web site is openings correctly and doesnt redirected to a malicious site.
- In HTTPS, data is encrypted, so it will be helpful for protecting your data as well as your visitors information.
Steps to Enable HTTPS in Blogger and Get SSL Certificate:
Google is providing free domain with the
Blogspot subdomain. We can easily activate HTTPS for blogger sub domain. But if you add the custom domain to blogger blog then Google will remove
HTTPS and serve the whole website in HTTP only.
- First Sign-in to your blogger account
- In the top left click on drop down, then choose the blog which you want to enable HTTPS.
- Click on Settings, then choose Basics in the left menu(Settings > Basic > HTTPS Settings). Here you will find HTTPS Redirect option.
- By default, it is inactive and selected as 'NO'. Simply turn it on by choosing 'YES' as shown in below image.
The above process is for accessing the blog in the encrypted version such as
https://yourdomainname.blogspot.com.
Just follow below advanced settings to
Enable HTTPS on Blogger Custom Domain.
Enable HTTPS for Blog Custom Domain
After signing into your blogger account, select the blog which you want HTTPS option.
- Goto Settings > Basic > HTTPS. Here you will find two options one is HTTPS Availability and HTTPS Redirect.
- Turned on HTTPS availability by choosing 'YES' as shown in below image.
- Then you need to wait for at least 20 to 30 minutes to activate HTTPS redirection. In this processing time, the redirection option will show the message which is shown below image.
- Check after 20 to 30 minutes, then redirection will be active. Choose 'YES' to complete the redirection process for your blog. Now you have successfully enabled HTTPS for your blog.
You can also read the
HTTPS settings guide from official support at this
link.
Common issues after making above changes:
After doing requited HTTPS you will face one issue which is mixed content. You may lose your traffic for some time.
What is mixed content?
After adding
SSL Encryption for your blog, you will see
Green Lock before your blog domain name in address bar. But some of your pages load in insecure connection. Hence you will notice below error.
"Your connection to this site is not fully secure"
This error occurs when your blog has mixed content. As we know, a website is a combination of
HTML, Javascript, Images and CSS files. When you open your website in a browser the HTML will be loaded with links to your resources(such as
images,
videos,
scripts, and
style sheets). When your HTML loaded over
HTTPS, the resources will be loaded under insecure connection which is in
http. So you will get the above mixed content error.
How To Fix “HTTPS - Your connection to this site is not fully secure”
Just follow below instructions to run your blog under secure connection.
- First you need to replace all http links to https links in your HTML. [first, take backup of your template.]
- Go to Template > Edit HTML here you need to find the HTTP links, just use Ctrl+f and type http: then you will find all images, scripts, videos links.
- Replace all http:// links with https://, also modify the links in your pages and posts. Don't forget to replace http links in your widgets and layout section.
After doing all the steps which are mentioned above, you need to do one more important step in your blog.
- First update your sitemap link with https: in your robots.txt file as shown below. Just go to Settings > Search Preferences > Crawlers and Indexing> Custom robots.txt
- You need to add a new property in Google Search Console with https://www.yourdomainname.com and verify it. Then submit your sitemap which is in this format https://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml
Once check your logo and favicon links whether they are opening with http or not. If yes then modify those links with https.
During this process you may lose some traffic. But don't worry once your blog indexed with https in Google then you will get rankings and benefits.
And wait for the update of sitemap in your new property at search console. At the end your blogger blog open with green lock as shown in below image.
Conclusion: I hope this article on
How to Enable HTTPS for Blogger Blog Custom Domain will be helpful for many blogs. Please share your valuable feedback on this detailed article. You can also share your question on this setup, i will surely answer them.