Earlier this month, several tech companies––TechRadarPro, PCMag, released their lists for the “Best Web Hosting of 2025.” If your hosting platform didn’t make any of the lists, it could be time for a change. Here’s what to know about migrating your website’s hosting in 2025, including if it’ll cause your website’s SEO rankings to (temporarily) drop.
Will Migrating My Website Cause My Website’s Rankings to Drop?
According to Google, your website’s rankings won’t drop if you complete the migration process “by the book.” “If you do things by the book, meaning the website keeps being resolvable and the actual downtime is minimal, changing hosts should not have negative effects on your pages’ rankings in Google’s search results”, Gary Illyes said in 2024.
How Your Website Migration Can Go South:
- Location: You migrated your website to a hosting service that is not based near your audience. Suppose you live in the United States, and you’ve recently transferred your hosting service to a Chinese-based hosting service. If the hosting platform doesn’t have any data centers near your targeted audience, your audience’s loading speeds on your website could be significantly affected.
- Too Many New Changes: You changed your website hosting platform, then got carried away. New meta descriptions, SEO titles, and URLs can affect your website’s rankings as Google crawls them for the first time.
- Your Website’s Was Down for a Long Time: If your website is down for a day or two during migration, you don’t need to worry about your rankings dropping. But if your website’s downtime is over a couple of weeks, or even months, this could significantly affect your SEO rankings, as Google won’t be able to crawl your website.
How to Keep Your Website’s Rankings from Tanking After a Site Migration
- Make sure your website is backed up before you migrate your website. With a successful back-up, you won’t have to worry about losing any of your website’s content during the migration.
- Create a “testing” website where you can tweak any issues that may have appeared after migrating.
- Ensure that your website’s DNS is properly pointing to your new hosting provider.
Need Help Successfully Migrating Your Website to a New Hosting Platform? Contact Boston Web Marketing Today!
As New England’s top Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing company, we’ll help your business get found online easier. To learn more about our services, or to request a free website consultation, contact us on our website or call us at (857) 526-0096. We’ll be in touch soon!