While responding to a question about whether switching web hosts could hurt SEO and ranks, Gary Illyes from Google shared his opinions. It makes sense to ask because moving a website to a new web host involves technical details that could go wrong and cause problems immediately.
How Does Changing A Website Host Work?
It can be hard to switch web hosts, but if your site is just WordPress, it’s usually pretty easy to do, especially if you use plugins.
Performing a manual transfer, on the other hand, is pretty easy if you already know how to use an SFTP tool and manage a website’s database with phpMyAdmin.
Gary Ilyes says to do things “by the book,” which is a lot of work and might be scary for people who have never done it before.
Read More: Right Web Hosting Company: 10 Tips for Choosing a Good Web Hosting Provider
How Does Changing Web Hosting Affect SEO?
The query was as follows:
“My company is thinking about moving our website to a different host. Would making the switch have a detrimental, long-term impact on our SEO rankings?
Gary Illyes answered:
Changing hosts shouldn’t have a negative impact on your pages’ rankings in Google’s search results if you follow the book, which means the website remains resolvable and the actual downtime is minimal.”
Here are Two Things to Keep in Mind
Gary Illyes thinks that the new web host is just as good as the old one in his answer. Of course, lowering the site hosting could have bad effects that range from mild to serious.
Gary pointed out two things to keep in mind:
- Website domain resolution
- There is little downtime.
1. Website domain resolution
This refers to the process of turning the domain name into an IP address that points to where the website is hosted. Most of the time, this means changing the Name Servers (NS) information at the domain name registrar after getting it from the new hosting platform where the site files are stored. The proper IP address for the new web hosting space should also be in the A Record (Address Record), along with other entries that deal with email.
2. There is little downtime.
It might surprise you to learn that your website will keep its ranks even if it is down for a few weeks as long as everything is back to how it was before. I know this for sure because I’ve been running websites for 25 years. For example, my websites have sometimes gone down because the dedicated web server’s hard drive failed, I made a mistake that caused 500 problems, or I had to take a website offline to fix stolen data.
While a website can come back online after being down for a few weeks, Google takes about the same amount of time to crawl through all of the pages again and add them to the SERPs.
