Does Website Migration Affect SEO?




The answer is yes, website migration affects SEO. Whenever you make serious changes to your website, you compromise your SEO. When you buy WordPress hosting packages, you may get free migration services, too or you may choose to migrate yourself using your developer. However, although the migration is free, it doesn’t mean it is optimized for SEO.


Therefore, website migration affects SEO. In fact, any server change has a small SEO risk with or without modifications to your website,  but that’s not naturally a bad thing. 

Basically, migrations affect website speed. So if you migrate your website to a new high-speed host, you’ll realize an increase in your site speed. Since fast loading time is a top SEO ranking consideration, this can help you, not hurt you. Sad to say, the opposite is also true; meaning that if you migrate to a slower or cheaper host, you'll experience a decrease in site speed.


This way, the users who experience slow loading times, will not be willing to revisit your site in the future. In fact, if a page loads in more than 2 seconds, you will lose more than 50% of visitors. Since 2010, speed has been a ranking factor for desktop searches on Google. When researching new hosts or want to buy WordPress hosting packages, look for speed optimizations or find out how the web hosting company optimizes its servers for speed.


Changing web hosting providers may have risks too, mainly if you lose particular functionalities at the new host or move from Apache to Nginx or IIS (Internet Information Services). If you have any concern about changing hosts, you can contact our sales team and ask about the process and make sure your server needs match up with what we can offer you. 


Now that we’ve explained how website migration affects SEO, let’s check out the migration process. You can make use of the following SEO checklist to get your website ready for its migration:


  1. Build a staging website on your new server. Before calling off your other web hosting plan, analyze your existing site’s page load speeds in opposition to the new server’s load speeds. Fortunately, the new server increased your website speeds!

  2. Choose a time when the pages load slowly. After examining your new site on the server, select a little time to perform the DNS propagation. Your site may be down for up to 24 hours because the DNS propagates around the world, but select a time when your site has low traffic, to not miss chances for leads and transformations. 

  3. Check out different things on your site. For instance, check the overall health of your website. Is there any punishment for spammy backlinks? Are the present backlinks related to the content? It is recommended to  pursue your site’s domain authority with Moz Pro. 

  4. Crawl your website. With Moz Pro or ScreamingFrog, you can crawl your website to get a full URL and content inventory. After that, you can troubleshoot all the problems while you’re staging your site and map old URLs to new URLs in your 301 redirect map.  

  5. Refresh Internal Links. Check out your website and refresh internal links to keep away from internal redirects or broken links. With ScreamingFrog, you can find internal links and their attached anchor text and their respective pages.

  6. Make a custom 404 page. When visitors encounter a broken page, captivate them with a custom 404 page. It should guide them to your homepage or extra pages on your website. If not, an empty 404 page discourages users and makes them want to close the browser tab altogether and find another website.

  7. Update your Robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages the crawler can or can’t request from your website. It exists at www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. 

  8. Try out your website on mobile. Examine whether it is responsive or rendering correctly on a mobile device? Google offers a Mobile-Friendly Test tool to discover, if it views your site as mobile-friendly. 

  9. Calculate your performance post-launch. When you’ve made sure your website launches properly, no broken pages or backlinks exist, your site is mobile-friendly, and you’ve updated your robots.txt file, examine your performance after you launch your website. Look over your ranking performance, organic traffic users/sessions, examine site crawl problems, and watch your backlink profile. Trace any 404 page traffic in your Google Analytics post-launch to take and add up any redirects you want to your 301 redirect file. 


SEO doesn’t need to be an important concern for you when you migrate your website to a new host. With a few arrangements, you can accurately carry out a website migration without the need to be worried about lowering your website’s ranking.

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