Migrating My Blog To HTTPS Was The Biggest Mistake Financially

by | Sep 17, 2015 | How-To/Tips, Wordpress

So, Google announced that websites that migrate to all HTTPS would get small bump in its search engine result pages. Many webmasters, including me jumped on the news and quickly migrated our sites and blogs.

For over a year, all the pages on this WordPress blog were full-HTTPS. I made sure of that. Everything went to HTTPS from HTTP with the help of plugins and Nginx 301 redirects.

After a year, here are my findings.

  1. If you run AdSense units on your blogs to generate income, don’t switch to HTTPS. Switching to HTTPS will hurt your income and you probably won’t gain more traffic to make up for the loses.
  2. I did not see any benefit after I switched to HTTPS. The small bump that Google promised webmasters, I didn’t see it. Others may have noticed an increase in traffic, but not me.
  3. My AdSense income dropped by more that 75%. Seriously. 75%. I was hopping to gain more audience to make up for the lost income, but they didn’t come. That’s just not cool.. no good reasons to switch to HTTPS.

  • I recently switched back to HTTP. For a month now, my income has increased by 50%. Cool! I am not going back to HTTPS unless AdSense issues with HTTPS are resolved.

So, those are my findings. If you have not switched to HTTPS and you depend on AdSense to pay the bills, don’t do it. Stay with HTTP. For those webmasters who do not depend on AdSense can switch, but don’t expect users to come in droves… never gonna to happen.

Some of the changes I did over the years are, switching to Google Domains — hoping that Google will favor those sites hosted on its domain registries.. no benefits there.

I left 1and1 web hosting and switched to Google Compute Engine.. my bill was cut in half with improve website performance. At the time I left 1and1, I was paying around $80 a month.. now I am paying just over 40 per month with Google Compute Engine.

I also switched from Apache2 to Nginx web server. Optimized Nginx to improve my site performance. It helped big.

I am going to stick with my current settings and providers. My domain will continue to be hosted on Google Domains and content hosted with Google Compute Engine. I am going to stick with HTTP for as long as AdSense is still a problem.

That’s it!

For those who disagree otherwise, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!