As you might be knowing google considers http and https websites as two different websites while ranking, hence its always better to have SSL certificate installed as early as possible to your website so that you may not loose the google rankings.
To install SSL certificate you have to take help from your hosting provider as there might be different settings for differnet hosting service providers. Once, you have successfully installed SSL certificate, make sure you follow “How to make sure your website URL shows “Secure” after SSL installation / Site Not Showing ‘Secure’ In URL After Installing SSL”
Once, those issues if any sorted, it will be time to make permanant changes into wordpress settings, for that login to your wordpress based website dashboard and click “Settings -> General” There, you have to change “Website Address URL” & “Site Address URL” from http to https as shown below,
now, scroll below, and click “Save Changes”
Now, if you open your homepage, you should be able to see “Secure” in front of the website URL in browser. This basically makes the basic setup ready and you are all set to use website with SSL.
But, we we said in beginning, we now have to inform google that we are now serving our website over https so henceforth rank https instead of http. For this, login to google webmaster account, and click “Add a Property” , in website input type your website with https added in begining like “https://lynxbee.com” and click “Add”
Once you added a https website, you will be asked to “Verify your ownership” of new URL, for this you will need to have FTP access to your hosting account, download the file as mentioned in “Alternate Method” -> “HTML File upload” method and upload to home folder of your site using ftp and verify the ownership by clicking “Verify” button, once you have successfully verified ownership and webmaster has new website, you are almost set.
The last option left is now, we have to add sitemap.xml of the newly changed URL https to newly added website to webmaster, for that, select your website from google webmaster dashboard, and click “Crawl” -> “Sitemap” and in this click “Add/Test your sitemap” and add your sitemap.xml URL like https://lynxbee.com/sitemap.xml and click “Submit”.
After, this you also need to redirect already ranked URLs from google from http to https with permanant redirection, so google should rank your https website than insecure http website, for this you need to modify your .htaccess file which is normaly at home folder of your website as,
Note: if your website is wordpress based, make sure to add below lines at the beginning of .htaccsss, since wordpress https redirection doesn’t work if we add below lines after wordpress redirection lines in .htaccsss [ refer to https://pagecrafter.com/htaccess-file-redirects-never-work/ if necessary ]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://lynxbee.com/$1 [L,R=301]In above, change website name from lynxbee.com to whichever your website is.
Thats It.. and you are all set to see your Secure website getting ranked in google.