How to Change Web Hosting Without Affecting Your SEO

Sooner or later, there comes the understanding of the need to change web hosting for one’s site. Many reasons can lead to such a decision, like lower costs of the new web hosting service, better security and support, and superior overall hosting performance.

While the goals are often clear, the road can be bumpy. If you migrate too fast and without proper planning, you will face various SEO risks, such as dramatic drops in ranking, broken links, and increased downtime.

Want to know how to avoid all these problems?

All the answers are in this guide. It will help conduct a flawless relocation of your website to a new web hosting for SEO integrity and performance.

Choose an SEO-Friendly Web Host

The choice of an SEO-friendly web host is the most important decision to make before starting the migration. Indeed, what’s the point in a thoroughly planned migration, avoiding all risks and taking precautionary measures, if the hosting provider is not worth it?

An SEO-friendly web host should, above all, possess the following essential characteristics:

• Fast server speed;
• Developer-friendly features;
• Optimal data center location;
• Google-optimized infrastructure.

A reliable web host should also apply to the effective practices of organic SEO by ensuring mobile optimization, minimal downtime, and strong security protocols. This is how to set the foundation for a successful transfer that aligns with your SEO goals.

Backup Your Website Before Migration

Many of us are familiar with the security protocols on PCs affecting each major operating system upgrade. We always back up our most critical files and configurations.

The same is true for the SEO web hosting transition. Perhaps even more so, as taking your business to a new web host poses far more expensive and far-reaching risks to your well-being than a trivial PC upgrade. 

What should you do? A few things:

• Aim to create a full website backup, including files, databases, metadata, URLs, schema markup, and other elements.
• Utilize your hosting provider’s backup tool if available. If not – back up critical files manually using FTP clients like FileZilla.
• Save your backup to cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox, besides copying it to a portable storage with enough space.

If you want to feel absolutely secure about your backup, consider testing it in a staging environment. Sure enough, this will take time, but the extra protection assurance it provides is worth it.

Set Up the New Hosting Environment

Setting up the new hosting environment is what you can do before the backup, after, or in parallel. The key is to do it properly, taking your time to ensure the new “home” is fully configured and ready for you to move in.

Choose the Right Server Configuration

Check if the new web host meets your requirements for storage, bandwidth, features, and processing power. For optimal SEO benefits, select a server with guaranteed SSL support, as you should never save money on security.

For those considering expanding their digital presence into mobile apps & app stores, you can consider using a web host for mobile apps.

Optimize SEO Website Hosting Performance

Install the necessary database management system (e.g., MySQL or PostgreSQL) and ensure you have the right security features and apps up and running, like firewalls, malware, and DDoS protection. Finally, configure HTTPS and verify SSL installation to maintain trust and SEO rankings.

Transfer Your Website Without Downtime

The last thing you want when migrating a website is to sacrifice user experience and SEO. Transfer too slowly, and your search ranking and domain authority may suffer. Transfer too fast, and you risk making mistakes.

So, to avoid downtime during transfer, consider taking these steps:

1. Keep your current hosting active until your migration is complete and thoroughly tested.
2. Sync all data before finalizing the switch to ensure no user activities are lost.
3. Update DNS records only after your migration is fully complete.

A well-planned migration should ensure visitors can still access your website and use its services while the transfer is on the way.

Update DNS Settings Properly

Domain Name System (DNS) settings play a key role in maintaining user experience and SEO performance during the move to a new web host. 

Here is what you should do step-by-step:

1. Access your current DNS settings. You can do this by navigating to the DNS management section and locating the A Record, Nameservers (NS), and CNAME settings.
2. Update all three settings (A Record, NS, and CNAME) one by one. If using a CDN or subdomains, verify that CNAME records correctly route traffic.
3. Wait for the update to complete. Please note that the process can take from a few hours to a couple of days, depending on your website’s complexity, network, and the new host performance. 

The most common issue faced by website owners is extended downtime. Unfortunately, even with a thoroughly planned and executed transition, downtime is inevitable. However, what you can influence is whether the downtime is only a few minutes or a few days – a huge difference, isn’t it?

Monitor SEO Performance Post-Migration

Testing that everything works as intended is the last, but not the least important, step in terms of SEO impact. 

Even when all seems to be going great, and you are getting positive performance returns from your new web host, the search engine optimization may lag behind. The most common reason is oftentimes beyond your influence – search engines may take time to recognize the new SEO hosting environment.

We recommend following this checklist when monitoring SEO performance post-migration:

• Verify website indexing. Tools like Google Search Console can help you find errors and display warnings. Inspect your robots.txt file for integrity and submit a new XML sitemap to prompt Google to crawl your website on the new host.
• Track keyword rankings. Ensure your keywords on the SEO-critical pages, like the landing and front page, have not dropped in rankings. Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and other popular SEO tools will be a great asset in analyzing keyword performance.
• Check redirects and broken links. When sites migrate, links often break, and the new host may send incorrect redirect messages. To spot and fix these issues in time, without affecting SEO, use tools like Ahrefs Site Audit or Screaming Frog.

After changing website host, WordPress SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and Rank Math can also help track performance, fix broken links, and ensure smooth search engine indexing. What’s no less important is that they can provide ongoing performance monitoring and spot emerging issues before they even cause damage. 

The Key Takeaways

Changing a web hosting for SEO needs never goes without at least minor hiccups. Minimal downtime and new server errors will happen no matter how strategic and thorough the transition is.

Your primary task is to soften the negative impact of these minor issues on your SEO. You can do so with these basic strategies:

• Choosing an SEO-friendly web host for your website migration.
• Thoroughly backing up all website files and configurations before undertaking the move.
• Carefully setting up the new hosting environment, prioritizing speed and performance.
• Properly updating DNS settings.
• Testing the new host’s performance before (in a staging environment) and right after the transition.

The thing that most website owners tend to neglect when migrating is internal linking integrity. As a result, upon migration, their internal links may not function properly, displaying the notorious 404 error.

However, this problem can be avoided. The solution is to use absolute URLs instead of relative ones. Absolute URLs maintain consistency and ensure that your internal links will continue to function correctly, regardless of changes in the directory structure or SEO hosting environment.