Website migration is when you move your website from one place to another, like changing your web hosting provider. This can affect your SEO, which means how well your website shows up in search results. But it’s not always a bad thing.
One important aspect affected by migration is the speed of your site. Faster sites are better for SEO, so if you move to a faster hosting provider, like Jetrails, it can actually improve your SEO. On the other hand, moving to a slower host can hurt your SEO because visitors don’t like slow-loading sites and may leave if it takes too long to load.
When you’re considering a migration, it’s essential to check if you might lose any important functionalities or switch to a different server software, like Apache to Nginx or IIS. Talking to the hosting provider’s sales team can help you understand the process and ensure it meets your needs.
To make the migration smooth without harming your SEO, follow these steps:
- Set up a testing site on the new server and compare its speed to your current site’s speed.
- Choose a quiet time to perform the DNS propagation, so your site isn’t down during busy hours.
- Check your website’s health, like any penalization for spammy backlinks or irrelevant links.
- Use SEMrush to fix any issues and set up proper redirects.
- Update internal links to avoid broken links or redirects.
- Create a custom 404 page to engage visitors encountering broken links.
- Update your Robots.txt file to guide search engines on which pages to request from your site.
- Ensure your site is mobile-friendly using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
- After migration, measure your performance in ranking, organic traffic, crawl issues, and backlinks, and fix any broken pages.
With proper preparations and following these steps, you can migrate your website without harming your SEO. Our migration experts at Reed Dynamic are here to help your team make the needed changes to your website and needed migration to increase your SEO and business potential.
