Ranking high in the SERPs is the end result of countless SEO efforts. A large number of factors are playing an intrinsic role in the rankings, each of them impacting your performance. Optimizing your site for each of them is a rather challenging task. However, you can focus your efforts on a couple more important ones. The SSL certificates are a factor that can be pretty effective for SEO purposes.

The ownership of such a certificate has become the norm for the internet. It is well-known that they can have a significant positive impact on your website. But, the question is, how important are they after all?

More than a decade after Google first confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal, the question has changed shape. Nobody wins rankings simply by installing a certificate any more. You lose ground without one. The sections below break down what HTTPS really does for search performance, which type of certificate you actually need, how to migrate without losing traffic, and the mistakes that quietly cost sites rankings for months before anyone notices.

Perceived Authority

Often, the rankings are all about authority. Who’s got the best website design, the best domain name, and the best content. Many things outside of technical SEO can play an important role in the perceived authority of your site. Having an SSL certificate for your website can improve your SEO and authority.

Websites with HTTPS connections represent the default state of the internet. Each reputable website has such a connection to ensure the privacy of its users. If you opt not to use one, your audience might look a bit weird at your site. They might see you as an invaluable source of information due to the lack of a secured website.

In some cases, because you lack a valid SSL certificate, browsers and search engines might even showcase a warning to the users before entering your site. Setting up such a barrier makes it more likely that the users will instantly leave your website.

This is no longer a hypothetical. Chrome has been labelling every plain HTTP page as “Not secure” in the address bar since 2018, and the other major browsers followed. Type anything into a form on an unencrypted page and the warning becomes louder still. Browsers also try HTTPS first before falling back to HTTP, which means an insecure site now sits behind an extra layer of friction on every single visit.

The problem is that the lack of such a certificate can impact other SEO related things. The high bounce rate and low view count resulted from the lack of an HTTPS connection will signal to search engines that your website is less valuable. This will negatively impact your rankings.

The good news is that the presence of a valid SSL certificate will do the opposite, resulting in a positive SEO boost.

SEO Boost

Google is always trying to ensure the privacy of its users and the relevance of the indexed content. For that reason, they have started to push SSL certificates onto webmasters. A secured connection was only a possibility before. Now, it has become a requirement.

Google and other search engines perceive websites with an HTTPS connection as being more trustworthy. In a past update, Google stated that they will start offering a slight SEO boost to secured websites. This is made to promote the usage of SSL certificates by webmasters.

That announcement came in August 2014, when Google described HTTPS as a ranking signal and called it “lightweight”, affecting fewer than one percent of global queries at the time. Google has repeated since then that it works mostly as a tiebreaker: when two pages are otherwise equally good answers, the secure one wins. Treat it as the last decimal point of a ranking calculation, not as a growth lever.

The indirect effects are far more interesting than the direct signal, and they are where the real gains sit:

Speed. Browsers only negotiate HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 over TLS. Staying on HTTP/1.1 means giving up multiplexing and header compression, which shows up in Largest Contentful Paint and, on interaction-heavy pages, in Interaction to Next Paint (the metric that replaced First Input Delay in March 2024).
Clean attribution. When a visitor clicks from an HTTPS page to an HTTP page, the browser strips the referrer. Those sessions land in GA4 as direct traffic, so the referring site never gets credit and you cannot see which of your placements are working.
Modern browser features. Service workers, web push notifications, geolocation, the clipboard API and payment request all require a secure context. No certificate means no progressive web app, no offline caching, no on-site push.
Link acquisition. Editors, journalists and site owners are noticeably less willing to link to a page that greets them with a browser warning. That friction compounds over a whole outreach campaign.

What a Certificate Actually Proves

It is worth being precise about this, because a lot of marketing copy overstates the case. A standard certificate proves two things: that the traffic between the browser and the server is encrypted and untampered with, and that whoever requested the certificate controls the domain name. That is all.

It does not prove that the business behind the site is legitimate, solvent or honest. Phishing pages run on HTTPS too, and they always have. So HTTPS is a floor, not a differentiator, and the padlock is a hygiene factor in exactly the same way a working contact page is.

Which Type of Certificate Do You Actually Need?

This is where budgets get wasted. Search engines do not distinguish between certificate tiers. A free automated certificate and a four-figure enterprise certificate produce exactly the same padlock, the same secure context and the same ranking treatment. The differences are about validation depth, warranty and operational convenience.

Certificate type	What it verifies	Typical use	Effect on rankings
Domain Validation (DV)	Control of the domain, nothing else	Blogs, brochure sites, most small businesses	Identical to every other type
Organisation Validation (OV)	Domain control plus company registration checks	Corporate sites, B2B portals, intranets	Identical
Extended Validation (EV)	Full legal vetting of the organisation	Finance, insurance, regulated industries	Identical, and browsers stopped showing the company name in the address bar years ago
Wildcard	One domain plus all first-level subdomains	Sites running shop., blog., app. and similar	Identical
Multi-domain (SAN)	Several distinct domains on one certificate	Multi-brand groups, agencies, ccTLD sets	Identical

For the overwhelming majority of content sites, a free DV certificate issued through Let’s Encrypt or the equivalent service bundled with your host or CDN is the correct answer. The certificates are valid for ninety days and renew automatically, which is a feature rather than a limitation. Certificate lifetimes across the whole industry are being cut in stages under a CA/Browser Forum decision taken in 2025, heading toward a maximum of 47 days by 2029, so any process that depends on a human remembering to renew once a year is already obsolete. Automate it now.

Pay for OV or EV only when procurement, compliance or an insurance policy asks for it by name. It is a legal and trust decision, never an SEO one.

Migrating to HTTPS Without Losing Rankings

Almost every horror story about an HTTPS migration is really a story about a botched URL change. The protocol is part of the URL, so moving from HTTP to HTTPS is a site move. Treat it with the same discipline you would give a domain change and it becomes uneventful. Here is the sequence we follow.

Before you switch

Crawl the live HTTP site and export every URL, title, meta description, canonical tag and status code. This is your baseline for comparison afterwards.
Export the last sixteen months of Search Console data by page and by query, plus your GA4 landing page report. You cannot spot a drop you never measured.
Install the certificate and confirm it covers every hostname you serve, including the www and non-www variants and any subdomains.
List every hardcoded HTTP asset: theme files, plugin scripts, ad tags, fonts, embedded videos, tracking pixels, hotlinked images in old posts.
Pick a quiet window. Avoid launching the day before a sale, a campaign or a public holiday.

On the day

Update internal links, canonical tags, hreflang annotations and structured data URLs to the HTTPS versions. Internal links should point at the final destination, never at a redirect.
Redirect every HTTP URL to its exact HTTPS equivalent with a single server-side 301. One hop, same path, same query string. Do not funnel everything to the homepage.
Regenerate the XML sitemap with HTTPS URLs and update the sitemap reference inside robots.txt. Keep robots.txt reachable on both protocols during the transition.
Add the HTTPS property in Search Console, or better, use a Domain property so both protocols and all subdomains report together. Resubmit the sitemap there.
Update every external touchpoint you control: Google Business Profile, social bios, email signatures, paid campaign destination URLs, affiliate feeds, API callbacks.

After the switch

Recrawl immediately and compare against the baseline. Every HTTP URL should return a single 301, and every HTTPS URL should return 200 with a self-referencing canonical.
Open the browser console on your ten most important templates and look for mixed content warnings. Fix them at the source rather than with a plugin that rewrites output on the fly.
Watch indexed page counts and impressions in Search Console daily for the first fortnight. A short wobble while Google reprocesses the URLs is normal. A sustained slide is a signal to go back to your redirect map.
Chase your best backlinks. Redirects preserve the value, but a direct link is still cleaner, and site owners will usually update a URL if you ask politely.
Once you are confident nothing is broken, enable HSTS so browsers stop trying HTTP at all. Start with a short max-age, verify, then extend it.

A worked example

Take a 400-page WordPress site with a blog, a shop section and a decade of old posts. The crawl finds 412 indexable URLs and 38 hardcoded HTTP image references inside old articles. The certificate is issued for example.com and www.example.com. The redirect rule is written once at the server level so that http://example.com/any/path becomes https://www.example.com/any/path in one hop, and the old www-to-non-www rule is folded into the same rule instead of chaining behind it. The 38 legacy images are fixed with a database search and replace on the exact string http://example.com, not on a broad pattern that would also rewrite outbound links. The sitemap is regenerated, a Domain property is added in Search Console, and the redirect map is spot-checked on the twenty URLs that carry the most impressions. Total working time: an afternoon. Total drama, when the checklist is followed: none.

Mistakes That Quietly Cost Rankings

Redirect chains. HTTP to HTTPS to www to trailing slash is four requests where one would do. Every hop slows the page and wastes crawl budget.
Canonical tags left on HTTP. The classic self-inflicted wound. You tell Google the secure page is a duplicate of an address that now redirects.
Mixed content. A single script or stylesheet loaded over HTTP is blocked by the browser, which can break navigation, sliders or checkout flows without any visible error to you.
Certificates that only cover one hostname. Visitors who type the www version get a full-page browser interstitial. Nobody clicks through that.
Expired certificates. An expiry on a Friday evening can take a site out of action for an entire weekend. Automate renewal and add an external expiry monitor as a second line of defence.
Incomplete certificate chains. Desktop Chrome may forgive a missing intermediate certificate because it caches one. Older Android devices and many crawlers will not.
Forgotten subdomains. The main site is secure but the help centre, the careers portal or the old landing-page subdomain still runs on HTTP, and those pages are indexed too.

A Ten-Minute HTTPS Health Check

Run your domain through SSL Labs. Anything below an A grade deserves an explanation from whoever manages the server.
Request the HTTP homepage and confirm it answers with a 301 straight to the HTTPS homepage, with no intermediate hops.
View the source of a template page and search for http://. Ignore schema.org namespace declarations; investigate everything else.
Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on a key page and check that the indexed URL Google reports is the HTTPS one.
Open your XML sitemap and confirm every entry starts with https.
Check the certificate expiry date and confirm that automatic renewal has actually run at least once, rather than merely being switched on.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will installing an SSL certificate improve my rankings on its own?

On its own, barely. The direct signal is small and Google has always described it that way. What it does is remove a penalty you may not realise you are paying, in browser warnings, lost referral data and reduced willingness to link to you.

Is a free certificate worse for SEO than a paid one?

No. Search engines check whether the connection is secure and trusted, not what you paid. A correctly configured free certificate and an expensive one are indistinguishable to a crawler.

Will I lose traffic during the migration?

Expect a short period of instability while search engines reprocess your URLs, especially on large sites. With clean one-hop redirects, corrected canonicals and an updated sitemap, positions recover as the new URLs are consolidated. Sustained losses almost always trace back to redirect errors rather than to HTTPS itself.

Do I need to change anything in Google Search Console?

Yes. A URL-prefix property is protocol-specific, so your HTTP property will stop collecting data. Add a Domain property, which covers both protocols and every subdomain, and resubmit your sitemap there. Keep the old property for historical reference.

What happens if my certificate expires?

Browsers show a full-page warning that most visitors will not click past, and crawlers may be unable to fetch your pages. It is one of the fastest ways to lose a weekend of traffic, and one of the easiest problems to prevent with automated renewal plus monitoring.

Does HTTPS affect Core Web Vitals?

Indirectly, and usually for the better. The TLS handshake adds a few milliseconds, but it unlocks HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, whose multiplexing and header compression typically outweigh that cost on any page with a realistic number of assets. Blocked mixed content, on the other hand, can wreck both layout stability and interactivity.

My site has no forms or logins. Do I still need it?

Yes. Encryption also protects the integrity of what you publish, preventing intermediaries from injecting ads or scripts into your pages. And every browser will still label the site as not secure regardless of whether you collect data.

Conclusion

Although having SSL certificates is not mandatory for SEO purposes, it started to become necessary. The direct benefit you’re receiving from the SEO boost is not necessarily huge. But, the benefits resulted from avoiding the issues coming with the lack of such a certificate are countless. Considering that Google is basically demanding an SSL certificate, any webmaster desiring SEO results should opt for one.

The practical takeaway is simple. Install a free automated certificate, migrate carefully with one-hop redirects, fix the canonicals and the mixed content, then move on to work that actually moves rankings: content, technical health and links. HTTPS is the ticket to the stadium, not the seat you want. If you would like a second pair of eyes on a migration or on the wider technical picture, that is exactly the kind of work we do at Web-Push.

SSL Certificates for SEO: How Important are They?