Do Website Transfers Affect SEO?

It's a well-known fact that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for increasing the organic traffic of a website, improving conversions, as well as enhancing brand visibility. However, SEO can be quite a challenge. To get your website to a high spot on search engines, you need to work hard and be consistent with your efforts. Search engines like Google tend to change the "rules" when it comes to SEO, and thus if you want your site to rank well, you have to stay up-to-date with all the changes.

There are other factors that can affect your website SEO, one of which is changing your web host. In this post, we will provide the knowledge you need to understand the SEO changes that come with migrating your domain to a new host while also taking your organic performance into consideration.

This post includes:

• How Does Changing the Domain Name Affect SEO?
• Hosting and SEO
• The Server Location
• The Quality of the Server
• The Page Load Speed
• The Hosting Plan
• Changing the Structure of the Website
• The Type of Hosting Plan
• Other factors that affect SEO

How Does Changing the Domain Name Affect SEO?

Let's start with a key fact to accept: You will definitely impact your SEO success and long term strategy by moving to a new domain.

Most website owners refuse to change their domain name in the vast majority of situations. After all, if the website is performing well beforehand, a domain change can negatively impact rankings and overall organic traffic volumes.

Take time to understand the implications of a domain name swap before choosing to move on it.

For instance, if you are retaining control over the old domain name (which you can do for up to ten years), you should deploy 301 redirects. These redirects will push visitors to your old URLs over to the most relevant pages on the new website/domain.

Alternatively, if you are planning to sell your old domain, you will be starting over completely. Without control of the old domain, you will lose all link equity you've built up or earned over the life of the website.

After selling the old domain name, take the old content and publish it in a new place. If the value of the content is good, it will probably attract new links anyway.

While search engines are trying to figure out what to do with your redirects, your organic traffic may very well decrease temporarily. If you keep generating great content for the new site, you should be able to recover your traffic within three-to-six months.

Hosting and SEO

Does hosting affect SEO? This is another question that is very common among website owners.

The short answer to this question is: "Yes." Moving to a new web host can have a detrimental effect on your SEO performance, just like domain name changes do.

Despite the widespread belief that hosting changes have no impact on SEO, there are a few instances in which they can happen.

The Server Location

Google used to categorize websites according to the nation where the hosting servers were situated using TLDs (Top Level Domains). They eventually switched to using IP addresses. To prevent traffic loss due to the new host's geographic location, it is crucial to ensure that the web host server is situated in the same nation as the one that your website serves.

The Quality of the Server

Find a web host that provides high-caliber hosting services, such as FastComet. You will drop in the SEO rankings if you choose a provider with overloaded servers and frequent outages.

The Page Load Speed

The majority of website owners strive to have their pages load as quickly as possible. Web hosting is one of the factors that affect how quickly websites load. Google will place you lower if your host is slow and your web page loading time is too long. Mobile searches, which now make up more than half of all internet searches, are especially likely to fall into this category.

The Hosting Plan

Be aware of the effects downgrading your hosting plan may have on your page rank if you are forced to do so for whatever reason. To reduce risk, choose the best plan from the outset that your budget will allow.

Changing the Structure of the Website

Different hosts will alter your website's structure in different ways. Crawlers may consider the site to be brand-new when they first encounter it, which could harm your performance and rankings.

The Type of Hosting Plan

Remember that a dedicated server is the greatest option for SEO when picking between shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting. Dedicated servers are not, however, affordable for everyone. To avoid downtime, which is highly terrible for SEO, choose a VPS hosting service provider that is dependable.

Make sure to research the new provider's track record of service and hosting options before transferring your website to the new host. Your switch to a new web server will undoubtedly have some small but substantial effects on SEO.

Other factors that affect SEO

Changing your domain name or hosting provider are only two of the many things that might impact your SEO rankings. It's critical to educate yourself on additional website structure-related issues that could affect how well your SEO campaign performs.

To continue to be at the top of the rankings:

• Make sure that you create a good website structure, because it will give a positive user experience, and the visitors will be more likely to keep coming back.
• Create a site structure that has sensible links for easy navigation.
• Create a great website structure so that Google Crawlers can have an easier time classifying, indexing, and ranking the site.
• Before developing or redeveloping a website, plan out a hierarchy in great detail that is as "flat" (i.e. only 3-4 clicks from the home page to any internal page) and as user friendly as possible.
• In a nutshell, anything that changes the structure, location, and content of your website will have an effect on SEO. The important thing is to try and use the discussed measures to minimize these effects.

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• How to Transfer Existing Website from BlueHost
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• How to transfer your website to FastComet hosting plans