(Entry was posted by Kyle Hawk on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/13/2017).

I am wanting to move over to https

Hello! Been a while since I asked a question here. I have an established site that I am wanting to move over to https. I plan on updating all links on my sitemap, and also having an automatic redirect to https (it will be via cloudflare service). Is there anything else I need to do to ensure my rankings don`t fluctuate? (ie, Google starts seeing my https site as a separate entity). Basically, I am number one for quite a few keywords, and just want to make sure this move doesn`t effect that. Thank you in advance, and let me know if you need more information :)

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Amit Shah: Also if you have GA acct then make sure your property is seeing the right version! Also setup search console to see the https version
Jody Nesbitt: GA no so much an issue, Google Search Console is as it need to be migrated there, in GA you can just change the domain from 1 to t`oher., make sure your redirects are done at htacess level and you use 301`s. cloudflare is fine, but what happens when you move on and have forgotten that you had those rules in places (also, they only give 3 rules on the free accounts) read this https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection & this https://moz.com/.../heres-how-to-keep-301-redirects-from... and you should be grand
Kyle Hawk: Thank you both for your replies! Mike Gracia Mixed content actually completely slipped my mind, but I will add that to my list to do. My site is hand coded, no CMS here. I will definitely have to look into http/2, see what my host supports (but honestly been thinking of switching soon anyway). Roma Alloui thanks for the link! I`ll be sure to check it out!
Mike Gracia: One thing to watch out for is mixed content errors... check your page source for any internal or external resources (images, css or js files etc) that are being served from http: protocol URLs. Where possible, I`d make a dev copy of the site to work on first. What CMS does your site use? Also, have you considered https but with http/2? (If your host supports this)... can be a speed boost and if you are going https anyway, if your host supports it then can be a good option (but be sure to re-optimise for speed, like not combining js and css files etc!). So, best thing I can say really, is if you can make a dev site to test https on without too much hassle (noindexed of course), do that. And watch for mixed content errors.
Roma Alloui: If you have the time, and an extra huge cup of coffee (or your preferred drink - I do not recommend reading this article under the influence of alcohol - LOL), online.marketing has a great article. just add the /guide/https/ to the online.marketing
Dan Thies: Get both versions working, change rel=canonical on both to https, change in search consoles, wait a few weeks, redirect.