The basic concept of moving a website from one host to another cannot be associated with the ranking of the website irrespective of the IP address of the website. However, at times you might experience a temporary drop in the rankings in case there is a downtime during the website transfer process. If you are transferring your website to MilesWeb, our technical support team will guide you in planning the transfer so that downtime can be minimized or completely removed and it won’t affect the search engine rankings of your website.
There could be a positive effect on the ranking of your website if your new web host is faster as compared to the old one; you might experience a surge in the rankings. This is because the search engines give preference to the websites that load quickly. It is important to note that website speed is just one of the several other factors that play a crucial role in your website ranking.
Here are some important factors to take into consideration while transferring your website to a new web host:
While making the switch, you want to ensure that the transition is smooth and invisible to the users. Moreover, you also want to ensure that the search engines are also aware of this transition so that the new pages receive the same quality signals that the old ages received. Errors like 404 should be avoided as they might affect the user experience and create a negative impact on the search engine rankings of your website.
Testing The Transition Process
You can test the transition process by moving the contents of a directory or a subdomain first, and then you can make use of the 301 redirects to redirect those pages to the new website permanently. This will let Google know that your website has moved permanently.
Test If Your Pages Are Showing Up
After completing the first step, you need to check if the pages on your new website are being displayed in the search engine results pages. Once you are sure that the website transition is working perfectly, you can consider moving the complete website. You do have the option of performing a redirect where you transfer the entire content from the old website to the new website simultaneously. However this is not always recommended as it might have a negative impact on the user experience.
Instead you can opt for a page-to-page redirect as it provides your users a better experience.
Redesigning Website
If you wish to change your domain name because you are planning to redesign your website, you can do it with the following steps: move the website first and then perform the redesign. This will take care of the volume of change that will be visible to your users during every stage of the redesigning process thus making the transition smoother.
Internal & External Links Of Your Website
Analyze both the internal and external links of your website. It is crucial to ensure that all the all the incoming website links are redirected to your new website. You need to analyze the internal links of the old website as well in order to update them so that they can point to the new domain. Once all your website content is transferred to the new web host, you can make use of a link checker to make sure that there are no broken links in your new website.
