The Google Chrome Team has released a “work in progress” guide to transitioning a website to HTTPS.  For those of you who didn’t immediately transition to HTTPS when Google first announced that it would be used as a ranking signal (which they later announced would not be visible), you probably want to add it to the upcoming to do list, as Chrome is planning to alert users when they try to visit an unsecured site.

The guide, written by Chris Palmer on the Chrome team, gives step by step details on how to transition without any issues.

This document describes a series of steps you can follow to gradually migrate a small or large web site from HTTP to HTTPS. You can take the steps at any speed — all in 1 day, or 1 step per month — but you should take them in order.

Each step is an incremental improvement and has value on its own. However, your site does not provide a security guarantee until you have completed all migration steps.

They have made the document editable, asking people to leave comments, so that others can offer their own tips and advice.  However, I suspect it won’t be long until someone tries to add affiliate links to certificate sites!  The editing is currently disabled by Google Docs due to its popularity.

This document is a work in progress! Please feel free to insert constructive comments to improve the text and to ask questions I haven’t answered. If you want credit for your contributions, please include your name in the comment. Thank you!

If you haven’t made the HTTPS migration yet, it is definitely worth reading and following Google Chrome’s How to Migrate to HTTPS guide.