Free SSL or HTTPS for custom domains is now available for your blog hosted on Blogger

WebBloggerFree SSL or HTTPS for custom domains is now available for your...

This is a good news that Google is finally providing a free SSL ( Secure Sockets Layer) certificates to all custom domain hosted on blogger. This is the second major steps Google has taken after making SSL important for all the websites for better rankings in search engine. If you are hosting you blog on blogger and paying to your domain registrar or CDN service provider for a SSL certificate, you should be very happy to hear that you can now get the free SSL from blogger and do almost everything you could with a separate hosting package. But don’t be so happy as I tried the free SSL or the HTTPS for custom domain in blogger and could not find it working well with AdSense.

Notification of Free SSL, HTTPS connection on Blogger Dashboard
Notification of Free SSL, HTTPS connection on Blogger Dashboard

I noticed that some of the older and best performing ads are not delivering ads. I initially thought, it would be the browser caches and history. I cleared the browser history, cookies and caches and tried to load the page in “incognito mode of chrome”and “private browsing mode of Firefox” and still no help. The same were delivering the ads if loaded over non https protocol, i.e on simple non SSL url.

If you are also excited to apply the HTTPS settings for your custom domain hosted on blogger, be little careful before you try this out. Also monitor the AdSense earning after applying the seetings. You can setup the free SSL on your custom domain hosted on blogger easily. here is what you need to do to try it out and install free SSL on your custom domain.

  1. Login to blogger dashboard.
  2. Choose the custom domain if you have multiple blogs hosted on blogger.
  3. Go to Settings > Basic.
  4. Select ” Yes” under drop down list next to HTTPS availability.
    Enable HTTPS or SSL on custom domain hosted of free Blogger platform
    Enable HTTPS or SSL on custom domain hosted of free Blogger platform
  5. A message saying “HTTPS Availibility is being processed. Check back later.
  6. Just refresh the page after 5 minutes and the SSL would already have installed on your blog for the custom domain.
  7. It may take 10-15 minutes to process and load the site over HTTPS connection. So I recommend try after 30 minutes and see if all the pages are loading properly and you see a green padlock sign in browser.
  8. If the Green Padlock sign that ideally shows for any secure site also have any exclaimation mark or says the connection to this site is not fully secure then follow this guidelines mentioned by Google. After reading that article by Google you can fix the mixed contents or not fully secured errors for your blog or website hosted on blogger.
  9. If you still can not find the solution and need help you can ping me on skype:live:hawkdivetech or leave a comment below, I will try to respond asap.
  10. The only thing which I worried about was my AdSense earning. So I suggest you try to open all your best performing pages ( or most viewed pages) and see if the Ads are showing or delivering on those page while loaded over HTTPS connection.
  11. If you can not see the ads try to reload the page over HTTP connection and see if the ads are delivered.
  12. I even tried to load my website on a different internet connection to switch the ISP and the same thing happened.
Verdict:  Be careful before applying the free SSL or HTTPS availability setting for your custom domain on blogger. Make sure you check most of the old and new pages to confirm if they are delivering the ads over HTTPS connection. Google may bring some changes and it could run smoothly very soon since it’s just new for the custom domain so make sure you ave checked this and you don’t lose out on your daily earnings.

It really is a great decision by Google to provide free SSL for all the domain hosted on Blogger’s free platform. I am very happy to see that and maybe we need to find some workaround to make this work flawlessly.

Free SSL, HTTPS certificate by Blogger to custom domain
More importantly, if you have made up your mind to migrate your site to load over https, make sure you follow Google’s guideline to retain all the SEO score and page ranks. So that you do not lose your site’s traffic volume. Although selecting HTTPS redirect to yes will automatically make your site moved to https://domain-name.com version but Google recommends to add the canonical tag in header to let search engine know the URL change from http://domain-name.com to https://domain-name.com. To find out the guideline and steps to do when moving a website with a change in URL, you can read this post by Google.
Nasir Sohail
Nasir Sohail
Nasir is a software engineer with an M.Sc. degree in software engineering and various certifications related to computer hardware and networking, such as MCSE, CCNA, RHCE. He has more than 15 years of mixed industry experience mostly related to IT Support, Web development and Server administration. He also offers his freelancing gig for IT support and consultancy and has more than 300 five-star reviews across platforms like Fiverr, Google, TrustPilot, etc.
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