Google’s Gary Illyes answered whether switching web hosting platforms could have a negative result for rankings and SEO. It’s a reasonable question because migrating a site to a new web host involves multiple technical factors that can go wrong and have an immediate negative effect.
What is involved in rehosting a website?
Changing web hosts can be complicated, but if your site is just a regular WordPress site, migrating to a new host is relatively easy, especially if you use plugins.
But even doing a manual migration is not that difficult if you are already familiar with website database administration with applications like phpMyAdmin and know how to use SFTP software.
Gary Ilyes’ answer refers to doing it “by the book”, which is actually a lot and can be overwhelming if you’ve never done it before.
Does changing web hosting affect SEO?
The question asked is:
“My company is considering switching hosts for our website. Would the switch have a negative and lasting effect on our SEO ranking?”
Google’s Gary Illyes responded:
“If you do things by the book, meaning the website remains serviceable and actual downtime is minimal, switching hosts shouldn’t have any negative effects on your pages ranking in search results from Google”.
Two things to keep in mind
Gary Illyes’ answer assumes that the new web host is as good as the old web hosting platform. Obviously, downgrading your web hosting can have minor to major negative results.
Gary mentioned two factors to consider:
Website domain resolves downtime is minimal
1. The website can be solved
This is a reference to how the domain name translates to an IP address that matches where the website is hosted. This usually means getting the nameservers (NS) information from the new website hosting platform where the site files are located and updating it at the domain name registrar. Also, the A record (Address record) should reflect the correct IP address for the new web hosting space (and other email related entries).
2. Downtime is minimal
Believe it or not, your website can be down for weeks and won’t lose rankings permanently, as long as when it comes back everything is exactly as it was before. I know this from personal experience as I have been operating websites for 25 years. For example, there were a couple of times where one or the other of my websites went down due to a hard drive failure on the dedicated web host, a misconfiguration that resulted in 500 errors, and due to of having an offline website to fix pirated files.
A site can recover from being down for weeks, and in my experience it will take Google a couple of weeks to re-crawl and add all web pages to the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Listen to the response on YouTube at 7:58 minutes:
Featured image by Shutterstock/New Africa
