Site Needs Consistent Redirects

[damengilland]

@aphostway @dankeyburn @hostwayeric @reverb1080

I'm going to start creating a few tickets for issues I see on the current Hostway Marketing Website that may impede our ability to launch the new site smoothly. Please let me know if you would like to use GitHub to track these (happy to add anyone you'd like from your side), or if you are handling the issue outside of this. Thanks!

Issue

Site should consistently redirect people to HTTPS and WWW.* Currently many pages do not have a redirect on them, and content is being served up however you ask for it. This is bad for SEO as it can result in content being flagged as "duplicate" if it's seen on different TLDs (WWW.* vs *).

For example, when a user goes to hostway.com they are redirected to www.hostway.com -- this is good, and most pages seem to have this consistent behavior. Until a user goes to the store, which is https://www2.hostway.com/login/ , from which point on all pages show up as https://www2.hostway.com/ -- note the www2 vs the original www subdomain.

Solutions here would be to have all pages redirect correctly, and / or set up Canonical URLs on all pages. Ideally every page would redirect properly, and every page would have a Canonical URL.

Note that HTTP and HTTPS are also a bit funky, as HTTPS is setup, but it's still possible to get to HTTP, and as some pages are linked using the "HTTP://" prefix, once the HTTPS is taken off, users seem to be stuck in HTTP. The server should be forcing all requests over to HTTPS.

• HTTPS provides more than just privacy || https://certsimple.com/blog/ssl-why-do-i-need-it

[reverb1080]

This is a known error that is related, in part, to our SSL certificate being deployed incorrectly. Unfortunately, there is a long tail on the fix, but let me see if I can put some fire behind it. Can you provide a detailed outline on how this will impact the launch of the new site?

[hostwayeric]

Not sure if Adrienne (and other’s cc’d) are on the distro.

I want (need) to keep this really simple. If we have anything that is broken (or sub-optimal) today that will NOT be part of the migration to the new site, then I’m ok if it remains sub-optimal after the launch. I don’t want to boil the ocean. Keep scope narrow and build for success.

We might already have a full “archive” site today: www2.hostway.com, so one of the things we’re doing wrong may actually help us here.

If a page does not make the “cut” as part of the Hostway 2.0 website, then it will remain on the www2 subdomain. We can then tell Google not to index/track the www2 subdomain.

Any and all things on our new website should work work the way the Internet gods intended them to work (per your notes below). But anything legacy can remain sub-optimal. Because one-by-one after our launch we’re moving all those pages to the new site (based on traffic numbers and priority).

[damengilland]

Hey Brent,

It won't slow us down from being able to do the work, it may have SEO implications post launch. I don't know your infrastructure, but generally these sorts of blanket redirects aren't hard to setup -- I was hoping it was a matter of just getting the redirect rule right... but you know more about it than I do.

Hey Eric,

This absolutely isn't stopping our progress, just goes with us wanting you to be as happy as you can with the new site one it's built. My big fear would be that someone would navigate to a WWW2 domain page and then Tweet, Blog, or link to a page on the wrong domain -- this splits our Domain Authority cred between two domains.

Two Top Level Domains (TLDs) and that's twice the marketing effort to grow domain authority... That make sense? We want to avoid this if we can, and like I said -- I think it's an easy fix.

[damengilland]

Hey so to be clear, it's a SMALL issue, but it's just something that we should clean up to prevent fragmentation of SEO efforts in the future. If I didn't think it was an easy fix I wouldn't have brought it up... but I'm not sure how things work across your servers.

[hostwayeric]

My impression after 60 days here, is that our current site is a mess, and changing it is always complicated.

We’ll dive in a little here with our current web architect (Ivo), but the the “splinting” will be minimal because only low-traffic pages are going to get left behind. And we’re going to be migrating them over a little bit every week until we’ve got them all — and then we can kill www2 entirely.

Bottom line: I understand that it “should” be easy to fix, so we’ll check; if it’s not easy to fix, then it’s no worse than where we are today on the low-traffic pages.

[damengilland]

Cool, I'm going to close this issue from our side. Feel free to reach out if we can help in the future. Thanks!

[damengilland]

Moving this back to "backlog" just so we can discuss it again. (=