Moving your website to a new server/DNS, if not performed properly, can affect your site’s SEO in different ways.
Given below are some issues that your site can encounter:
1. Page Loading Speed
The page loading speed of your website on a new location is a factor. If your pages take more than 2 seconds on the new server, then Google will drop your website’s ranking.
When you change web hosts, you need to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the new host carefully. You should ensure the new host is faster than old one.
Try to choose a professional hosting company and if possible go for a dedicated IP or even for a VPS if budget is not a constraint.
Popular hosts don’t necessarily provide quality services and very popular ones are likely to host a number of sites which wouldn’t be good for your website.
Unless your budget is a big constraint you should be skeptical of a shared hosting account because in the shared hosting account you get a limited space and your website takes plenty amount of time to get loaded thus frustrating the user experience.
2. Location of the new server
If the location of your server is not located at target audience then it can be a factor in the downfall of ranking. Google likes to check the IP that the website uses as one of their ranking rules is proximity to the user.
You should take into consideration the location of the servers when you change web hosts or hosting locations.
If your website focuses on a certain country, say the USA, your host, and its servers and infrastructure should also be located there as well. Your rankings could be affected significantly if that’s not the case.
3. Website Structure
When you are migrating your website to a new host, always take a duplicate of your site on a local server. This can hurt your website’s ranking on Google due to the changes in website structure.
For example, if you switch your content management system, say from Drupal to WordPress, it will change your URLs and directories; this can cause major issues if not done correctly.
4. Downtime
Extended downtime can downgrade your rankings on Google and other search engines. You need to choose a reliable hosting company for success.
It is recommended to leave the website on the origin server working until the transfer is completed.
You should give 72 hours for the DNS propagation to complete to ensure that search bots are properly crawling your website on the new server.
CONCLUSION
These are some of the issues that you can encounter when moved to a new host and further drastically affect your site’s rankings.
Hence you need to research well to find the best web hosting server that will provide the best search engine rankings.
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