How To Change Web Hosting Without Affecting SEO?

Website hosting for SEO is a crucial factor for your rankings as it has an effect on key attributes such as your site up- and downtime and the speed, at which it loads. How does switching a Website Hosting provider affect SEO? This article describes ways.

Steps To Change Web Hosting Without Affecting SEO 

Changing your Domain

We recommend putting a permanent redirect on old pages if you want to change your domain name so your users can access the new domain. 302 and 301 are the most commonly used types of redirects in web development. The former means you haven’t moved permanently, and the latter shows Google that the move is permanent. 301 is more common.

Changing your Server Name

This change should not have any impact on your search engine rankings or SEO. Changing server names is a fast process lasting mere minutes.

Changing Website Hosting

If done right, switching website hosts should not have any adverse effect on search engine rankings and SEO. It should be a simple process if the site is a small one with several web pages. If you’re moving an enormous site with complex hosting, many servers, and lots of pages, then you might have a problem. To make this transition less complicated make sure to not change the OS of the server. So if you were using a Windows server, it is a good idea to use Windows hosting for your site and not change to Linux.

You can’t close your previous hosting location before your site is fully set up at the new host. You also need to make sure changes are made to the DNS, so the domain name is directed to the new host’s location.

Generally speaking, website operators, search engines, and customers are the main parties involved in website hosting changes, and they all need to be taken into account if you want to avoid negative SEO effects as a consequence of these changes.

 

Help Search Engines Adjust

Search engines will adjust to your new host unproblematically with almost no effects on SEO if you “let them in” on the changes being made as well as the new site structure, domain, URL, and the new hosting location.

Types of Web Hosting

The main types of web hosting are shared hosting, VPS, and Dedicated Web servers. When making the transition, it should be seamless and practically invisible to site visitors. We strongly suggest making sure search engines are aware of your site so your new pages will rank as high as your previous ones did and enjoy the same interest.

Your rankings will be impacted by 404 error messages adversely because they can tarnish the user’s experience.

Tests to Run

To test the transition process,we recommend moving the contents of a directory or sub-domain first, then using the 301 redirect to permanently redirect those pages to the new website. This way, search engines will know that your site has moved permanently.

The second step is to check if the pages on your new website are showing up in Google’s results pages. You can move the whole site once you’ve made sure the transition is working correctly. It may be easier to transfer all the content from your old site to the new one at once, which is known as a blanket redirect. Please note this may have an adverse effect on your users’ experience.

Users will enjoy a consistent and transparent experience if you do a page-to-page redirect instead of a blanket one.

Rebranding a Site

Let’s say you want to change your domain because you are rebranding or redesigning your site. This process takes place in several stages. Before you get down to the fun part – redesigning – you need to move the site. This will make the move seem more seamless to visitors because the amount of change your users can see in each phase of the process will be more manageable.

Broken Links are a No-No!

You’d be surprised how often this is overlooked. To avoid broken links, check out both the external and internal ones in your site. A site manager should always make sure that incoming links are not being redirected to the old website. Use a link checker Bby prepostseo.com to assure yourself there are no broken links on the new site after you’ve transferred your content to the new host.

2019: SEO is still King

Be very careful when transitioning to a new website hosting provider. In theory, the move itself should not make problems for SEO. However, site owners and operators who go about it the wrong way might see a negative impact on the new site’s rankings and SEO. We hope our guide will make your transition a smooth and satisfying experience.