SEO: change site address from http://www. to https://

Question

My site was indexed as http://www.example.com.

Purpose: I would like to make a change to https://example.com

Question: Can you please give me a hint if I'm doing this in the best possible way?

What I've done:

1. I've made permanent redirection (301) from http://www.example.com and http://example.com to https://example.com

2. I've created 2 sitemaps:

   • sitemap_w.xml - which includes links like http://www.example.com/some-page1/, http://www.example.com/some-page2/ etc. - I'm not sure if I should use https here too?

   • sitemap_s.xml - which includes links like https://example.com/some-page1/, https://example.com/some-page2/ etc.

and included both of them in robots.txt

3. In Google Search Console I've added https://www.example.com and https://example.com. For all of existing versions (http://www too) I've changed preferred domain to non-www.

4. In Google Search Console I've updated robots.txt and added both sitemaps:

   • for http://www.example.com I've set sitemap_w.xml
   • for https://www.example.com I've set sitemap_s.xml

This is all I've done. Should I change something? Did I forget about any significant factor?

Answer 1

When you migrate your site from http to HTTPS, then make sure, you do 301 redirection to all files even for XML sitemap.

By giving two sitemaps, google just waste their crawling time, and it may cause some little delay to index your all webpages.