5 Major Disadvantages of using HTTPS in Blogger

5 Major disadvantages of HTTPS in bloggerNow when Google has provided the option of HTTPS encryption for blogspot blogs with non-custom domains, are you ready to turn on HTTPS on for your blog? But before that it is really important to understand the risks, complexity and SEO costs involved in switching to HTTPS. In our last post we discussed the differences between http and https and we also explained that less than 0.1% of all sites in internet has gradually adopted using https, though it sounds less but sites which are serious about a slight ranking boost in their search results are accepting to make this SEO shift. Lets discuss 5 major reasons why we recommend that you should not switch to HTTPS at this time and if 'enabling HTTPS' could effect your BlogSpot Search Ranking.

Note: Click the Button below to see full list of topics under discussion.

Topics List

5 Major Disadvantages of turning on HTTPs in Blogger

Following are some of the solid reasons that makes me think twice before advising someone to switch on HTTPs for his blogspot blog.

1. Blogspot Images have absolute paths and not relative

UPDATE: Blogger heard us finally! They have now introduced Relative URLS for blogger blogs.

All images that you upload in a blogger blog are stored inside Picasa web album. Before Google announced the use of HTTPS on its servers, Picasa was using the non-encrypted HTTP protocol for all its URLS. Though Picasa now has an SSL certificate and has enabled HTTPS encryption for itself but Picasa http URLS are not auto redirected to https in Blogger. All images that you upload are instead saved in http protocol which is the biggest SEO mistake and makes https useless for blogspot blogs because your visitors will continue getting http errors on your site unless you manually change each http to https in all your posts one by one! Which I know is hectic and time consuming. But no easy solution other than this.

Even if you have enabled HTTPS, your visitors will continue seeing the following http error in their address bar which can frighten them! =) It is caused mainly due to image links stored in http:// instead of https://

https error in blogspot blog

This issue could have easily be handled if blogger used relative URLS for storing images instead of absolute as shown below:

relative path and absolute path for images

In Relative URLS case you don't need to change the URLs from http to https because the image src will pick the current Domain URL structure of your site no matter how many times you change it.

For example if your URL is

http://example.blogspot.com

then your Images would then be stored at

http://example.blogspot.com/-/image.png

Now if you have changed your URL to

https://example.blogspot.com

then since you are using a relative path for images which is not changed, all your image URLS will automatically get the correct https URLs as shown below:

https://example.blogspot.com/-/image.png

Now since all your picasa images are stored with absolute paths then in this case your image URL will not be switched to https unless you manually do it as shown below:

If your Image has the following URL inside a post:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_7wsQzULWIwo/Srn4c3EpmaI/AAAAAAAAB24/rq9_CVED8is/s800/Animated%20Picasa.gif

now if you decide to switch your .blogspot.com domain to HTTPS, your image URL will not change and will remain the same as shared above unless you manually edit the post and replace http to https. The image will work with both http and https protocols. Test below:

https://lh6.ggpht.com/_7wsQzULWIwo/Srn4c3EpmaI/AAAAAAAAB24/rq9_CVED8is/s800/Animated%20Picasa.gif

This issue has been first time highlighted online and If someone from official blogger team is reading this post then I request them to fix this redirection problem the sooner possible.

2. HTTPS is not 301 redirected to https

Google treats https and http versions of your blog as two different sites. Because the http version of your blogspot blog URL is not 301 redirected permanently to the https version. This is the same problem that we discussed for Picasa images.

If you have enabled HTTPS for your blog then you will observe that you can access your blog with both http:// and https:// . You will notice that when you type http://yourblog.blogspot.com in the browser address bar, your blog will not be redirected to https://yourblog.blogspot.com!

This is a serious SEO mistake and can cause your blog get penalized with Panda penalty for promoting duplicate content. Because all your posts will appear twice in search results once for the http:// version and once with https:// encryption.

3. HTTPS can effect your Google PageRank

Due to poor configuration of 301 redirection, you will loose all PR juice of your backlinks for the HTTPS version of your blog URL. Sites which have linked to the http:// version of your blog URL, will pass the PageRank juice only to the http version and you will get no share in the HTTPS version of your site which is your ultimate URL!

In short that https version of your blog is a complete new site unless blogger 301 redirects the HTP protocols correctly.

4. HTTPS can reduce your AdSense earning

If you are a AdSense publisher, then you may see your earnings reduce significantly. Google itself says that sites with HTTPS pages earn less than those with HTTP pages because AdSense will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant and will not shows ads on your site which are using HTTP! =)

HTTPS-enabled sites require that all content on the page, including the ads, be SSL-compliant. As such, AdSense will remove all non-SSL compliant ads from competing in the auction on these pages. If you do decide to convert your HTTP site to HTTPS, please be aware that because we remove non-SSL compliant ads from the auction, thereby reducing auction pressure, ads on your HTTPS pages might earn less than those on your HTTP pages.

5. HTTPS can make widgets stop working on your blog

All your social plugins which have scripts hosted at HTTP will prompt http errors to your visitors unless you manually replace the http with https:// inside your blog template for all these plugins, and gadgets which uses JavaScript so that you may get rid of the mixed content issue. 

With HTTPs disabled the FB plugin was working correctly:

blogspot blog without HTTPS encryption

fb plugin working fine

With HTTPs enabled the FB comments count stopped working:

blogspot blog with HTTPS encryption

fb plugin not working in https

 

Willing to Turn on HTTPS?

If after reading all these points you still wish to switch to HTTPS then follow these steps:

To enable HTTPS:

switching on HTTPS in blogger

  1. Go To Blogger > Settings > Basic > HTTPS Settings.
  2. In HTTPS Availability, select Yes.
To disable HTTPS, follow the steps above and select No for HTTPS Availability.  

If you disable HTTPS, visitors will be redirected to the unencrypted HTTP version of your blog. However all bookmarks to your blog will continue to work.

In our coming posts we will discuss how to fix the mixed content issues linked with https and fix all such https errors inside the blogger template.

Have Questions?

This was my deep research on this new trending topic amongst blogspot users. I tried to be as much clear as possible and inform everyone about the SEO and revenue risks involved with HTTPS. Since https encryption is yet not available for blogs hosted on a custom domain, we will therefore wait and see if we can choose to switch to HTTPS. So far I am strongly against turning on HTTPS due to the above reasons that I explained, unless blogger provides an easy migration tool, it is almost impossible to edit each post manually and replace the http protocols yourself in order to get rid of the mixed content issue which is caused mainly by images and scripts inside your template and posts.

What are your views on this topic, have you planned to setup HTTPS for your blog? If yes then why haven't you yet decided to first buy a Custom domain for your blog and then take this step?

If you don't want to get yourself into Serious Technical Trouble while editing your Blog Template then just sit back and relax and let us do the Job for you at a fairly reasonable cost. Submit your order details by Clicking Here »

22 comments

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We have Zero Tolerance to Spam. Chessy Comments and Comments with 'Links' will be deleted immediately upon our review.
  1. Hey Bro, Nice Post but one thing that we can redirect our blog from http to https by using script as I'm using it on my blog, see : bloggerjinni.blogspot.com
    and we can also change the http in our template to // by using ctrl+shift+r so all the widgets will work correctly and our blog will fully secure!
    Regards,
    Abdul Samad
    - Peace!

    Blogger Jinni »

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can surely use scripts to do the job but scripts dont work in JavaScript disabled browsers, as a result it will only make matters worse.

      However in our coming posts we will share how to manually replace http with https correctly inside template and posts as you pointed out but not every link can be converted to https inside a template. We need to see which services/plugins are SSL complaint first.

      Delete
  2. :O, it seems like a terrible addition done by Google. LOL

    There is more harm than good, thanks for make us aware of these facts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I just found out that even webmasters does not have proper support for https at this moment, though it is over a year since google announced https. So you will have to re-submit sitemaps for both https and http at the same time. :)

      Delete
  3. I was thinking to turn my HTTP version into HTTPS, but after reading this I think at this time leave HTTPS :( Thanks Muhammad Mustafa Bro for providing nice info. It saved my money because I am on WordPress and it need more money to use HTTPS.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In wordpress the certificate for SSL/TLS costs around $100 annually so it is surely a really expensive sevice which needs better suppot online else the process of https to http would be quite slow.

      Even the SEO advantage of https over http is so less that it wont be that useful for publishers/bloggers like us unless we are running an e-commerce shop or milllion-pages site. :>

      Delete
  4. Wow!!!

    The things we can't get for reading from other resources.

    Thanks for taking time to do this blog post. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My pleasure buddy. No service should be opposed unless or until there are cons in it. We wrote a similar post for 10 Reasons to avoid Dynamic views to which Google replied themselves and luckily as we recommended dynamic views was a total waste of resources without offering any good support to the publisher.

      Delete
  5. Mohammad brother, I have no question but after my own research, I found that some of your written disadvantages are not correct and they are not really disadvantages and can be fixed by using simple things.

    Blogger's this feature is not as bad as we are thinking it is. Within couple of days, if you allow, I will share a post in which I will show that how most of the issues above can be fixed easily!

    Thanks,
    Shivansh Verma.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course there are solutions!

      Buddy I said it myself that we will share a post to provide solutions to these answers so yes solutions exists to all these problems but if a solutions means editing over 1000 posts manually to replace http with https then it is not a smart solution at all.

      Using JavaScript to do this job is not a SEO friendly approach at all. These problems can be only fixed smartly at server side if Blogger decides to do so else our solutions will only be long-cut indirect methods to achieve the goal.

      You can surely fix the 301 redirect issue with meta tags or with jquery or javascript. All methods will work but none is a smart and SEO friendly method. At least not for solving mixed content issue related to dozen of images on a blog post page. Scripts wont work for JavaScript disabled browsers so it will instead negatively effect the site's front view if tried.

      So these are surely major disadvantages with no smart/short solutions, however there are several long-cut solutions to these problems. That is what I meant by cons of https in blogger. Cleared buddy? :>

      Delete
  6. This article is an eye opener, enabling HTTPS will become grave mistake.. thanks a ton.

    ReplyDelete
  7. hi, please see my blog
    http://employeesjunction.blogspot.in/
    Although it is very old and updating regularly,my visitors are not coming through search engine. I always post on facebook and twitter, only then visitors come. Now, today as per your advise, I have opted 'No' on Settings of https:. So, I have disabled https. Please guide me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Search engines are not as hospitable today as they used to be. From social media till search engines all favor corporate sites. So a lot of hard work is involved when it comes to publishers like you and we. I would recommend that you apply all our SEO tips on your blog and keep writing quality content (content with at least 500 words in length). Read our Google Panda and Penguin Posts

      For more help you can always ask for 24/7 free help at our Support forum

      Delete
  8. Hi Mohammad

    Really great insight about serving AdSense over HTTPS causing reduced earnings.

    ReplyDelete
  9. hellow sir,
    i have a problem in my blog my blog does not redirect to http when url inclueds https.. what to do

    ReplyDelete
  10. If blogger were truly "democratic" they would provide a clear way to give blog owners the option to redirect https to http if they vehemently are opposed to https.

    My blogs do not collect personal or financial information. Therefore, it is absurd to use https

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hello Mustafa! I have a problem in my site. Whenever i open my site, I see a notification my Avast Antivirus that malware is blocked by (my site) how can I remove it. Is there any way to solve it??

    ReplyDelete
  12. i have a problem. after enable https in my blog for a while i have bought a custom domain name without encryption which main it is http only. and too many back-links for my blog is https out there. so what can i do to redirect https to http the new?
    with my best wishes.

    ReplyDelete
  13. hi bro good work
    but i still have a question
    i have haved turn off my HTTPS as you tell above but
    when redirect from facebook page adds not working couse of HTTPS
    help me plz
    http://kitfrends.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  14. hi bro
    some of my blog post url's on google search are on https and others are on http a i am not using https and if i directly type my blog url in address bar it serve me to https secure connection i want to remove https......

    ReplyDelete
  15. What a mess they leave us in, GOSH !!

    ReplyDelete