Yes, HTTPS can help SEO a little, but the bigger payoff is safer data and higher trust for the people who find you in Google.
From an SEO standpoint, Google has treated HTTPS as a lightweight ranking signal for years, so it can act as a tie breaker when two pages are otherwise close. In practice, switching to HTTPS rarely creates a dramatic jump by itself, but being stuck on HTTP can hold you back because it looks outdated and can reduce clicks. HTTPS also supports modern web features that can improve performance and reliability, which helps both rankings and conversions.
HTTPS matters even more for local businesses in Orlando because your leads usually come from high intent searches on mobile. If a browser shows “Not secure,” people hesitate to call, fill out a form, or book online. That is especially true for dentists, medical offices, law firms, and home services where you collect contact details, appointment requests, or payment info. If you want a plain-English breakdown of where this fits, our technical SEO FAQ explains how security sits alongside crawlability, indexation, and site performance.
If your site is still on HTTP, the move to HTTPS is mostly a controlled cleanup job:
- Install a valid TLS/SSL certificate and confirm every page loads on https://
- 301 redirect each HTTP URL to its matching HTTPS URL, one-to-one
- Update internal links, canonicals, sitemaps, and any hard-coded image, script, or CSS URLs
- Fix “mixed content” warnings (usually old image or script links)
- Add the HTTPS property in Google Search Console and submit the HTTPS sitemap
- Update your Google Business Profile website link and your main directory listings
The mistakes we see most: redirecting only the homepage, creating redirect chains (HTTP to www HTTP to HTTPS), forgetting canonicals, leaving mixed content on pages, and letting the certificate expire. Any of those can cause short-term indexing noise or conversion drops that look like “SEO problems” when it’s really a setup issue.
If you want help handling the move without disrupting leads, we usually roll it into an initial technical pass inside our SEO service, then monitor Search Console and analytics for crawl errors, indexing changes, and form tracking.
HTTPS also ties into hosting quality. Cheap hosting can make HTTPS feel “slow” if the server is underpowered or misconfigured, so it helps when SSL, caching, and server settings are managed together. That’s why many clients pair SEO work with our WordPress hosting when they want fewer headaches.
One last note: HTTPS is not a substitute for a fast site. If you want the practical conversion angle, our how site speed affects SEO FAQ explains why performance often moves the needle more than any single technical checkbox.
