Google: replace internal links from HTTP to HTTPS, but…

If you’re on an HTTP site and decide to migrate your site to HTTPS, it’s common practice to update all of your internal links from HTTP URL format to HTTPS URL format. Google’s John Mueller was asked about this at Reddit and he said, “I would always try to fix the internal connections, it just makes things cleaner and under your own control. But I doubt it would have any visible effect.”

In general, searching and replacing your CMS and database from your HTTP version of your URLs to make them all HTTPS instead isn’t much help to your developers. If you have to do it manually, it’s more of a pain. But find and replace can and probably should be done.

An even bigger problem is getting all your external links, links you don’t control, to update from HTTP to HTTPS. In this case, Google said in 2015, don’t bother.

Even for internal links, John said “I doubt it would have any visible effect” because you have those redirects in place. But why not do it, assuming you don’t break anything in the process?

Here’s an old tweet from Google’s Gary Illyes:

@pip_net if your redirects are implemented correctly, the benefit is so minimal that it’s not worth it IMO.

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) July 7, 2015

In short, if you can just replace with find and replace, do it. Otherwise, don’t worry too much about it.

Forum discussion at Reddit.