If you’re hosting your website with GrowthEngine, you will have received a notification in recent days that your site is being migrated to a more local server. As we mentioned in our email, the new server will be safer, faster, and enable a better user experience for visitors.

Google recently discussed the impact of website migration on SEO in an installment of its ‘Ask Googlebot’ YouTube series. Here’s what it said:

Crawling

The first thing Google does when you migrate your website to a new server is slow down ‘crawling,’ which is the search engine’s process for exploring, discovering, and analyzing publicly available webpages.

“When it comes to moving hosting, you might see our systems initially slowing down crawling a bit,” said Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller. “Any time we recognize a hosting change, we want to be sure that we don’t cause any problems. And we so we tend to automatically slow down crawling as a precaution.”

Once Google knows its crawlers won’t negatively affect the site, regular crawling will resume.

Loading Time

Changing hosts or servers can impact loading times, too – if your new server is further away from your users than your old server, loading times may slow down; if the server is closer, they may speed up.

“Due to physics and computer networking, it can take longer to reach a server that’s far away,” Mueller explained. “Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.”

In our case, the move to more local servers is likely to mean quicker loading times and – with a little help from Google’s algorithm – better SEO.

Contact Us

If you’re experiencing any sudden website disruptions or SEO fluctuations in the wake of our server change, please feel free to reach out directly. We’ll be happy to address these issues right away.

Image: Shutterstock