Best SEO approach for a HTTPS implementation on Wordpress?

Hi,

I'm planning on using SSL on a few pages of my Wordpress site (including home). I know I can use the Wordpress HTTPS plugin, but I'm avoiding any more plugins since my site is getting very slow.

Wordpress HTTPS uses 301 redirects, so I'm thinking about redirecting these few http pages to https using .htaccess rules. Anyway, this is the first time I'm facing this "problem" and I'm sure you guys have some good points of view and experience enough to give me some directions. Is a 301 plain redirect a good solution? I'm also planning on using the canonical rel to pass all juice to the http version of the site.

Thank you

Sounds like a good approach to me. I was just experimenting with this the other day. I just edited the .htaccess file.

It worked but I couldn't get the SSL to actually display secure (kept getting the broken problem). I learned why but in the end it would have required getting rid of some of the key elements of my page to get it onto secured. I ended up spending more time then I wanted to so I'm going to look back into it later.

As for slow site check out W3 Total Cache + Cloudflare. I got my site from 4-5s loading time to 1.2s on average with this combination

Thanks, pal! Well, I found a new issue. If a user access the http page, he gets redirected to the https version of the site. Problem is that all links in that page become https. When the user click on another link, it takes him to the https, ven though I haven't set a redirect.

About Cloudflare, I tried it but I'm sticking to W3 + MaxCDN. My site still slow since we screwed it up with too much custom code (Woocommerce and Gravity Forms were hard coded...)

Cheers!