Does switching hosting or changing the design of my website impact my ranking & SEO?
In short - it can, but if you do it correctly IT SHOULDN’T!
Switching hosting itself, shouldn’t really affect your ranking. If you are transferring your website from one host to another and a little detail goes wrong it can have an effect ( which you can usually fix).
This depends on a few things:
-Are you transferring/changing to a reliable host?
-Will there be any downtime (aka, will the website be non live for a bit, which is usually not the biggest deal unless you are a company with big traffic every minute of the day)
-Have you made sure SSL are in place with the new host?
What happens to my ranking if I re-design my website?
When you change the design or layout of your website - every time you do this, so this also applies when you make edits to text and change images; Google will re-evaluate your page, in other words have a crawl.
This does not mean that you should never do any edits, changes or straight up just leave a really old website - because how we use, and how we want to be able to interact with websites and digital content is constantly evolving. This means that what is considered good practice and SEO also evolves.
If you do a re-design and your ranking drastically dips, knowing how to use analytics will come in handy. Go to your Google-Analytics and have a look, here you can figure out if the issue is page specific or a site-wide phenomenon.
If it is key-page specific: did the content change? (Text, Imagery, CTA, Keywords)
If it is site-wide, it may not have to do with the changes you made, this could even be because of hyperlinks from other sites that are broken, have been removed etc. Which could have coincided with you changing the design.
As always, it is important to check the mobile usability whenever you make any changes. Websites are being graded by their mobile-first experience.
In summary - don’t be sccared to make upgrades, updates or changes to your website! A re-design can also help you improve ranking, especially when working with a professional who knows how to design for optimal user journeys and on page-SEO something that greatly impacts ranking in search engines!
As always it is important to keep in mind that SEO and search engine ranking is a long game, and you will not be detect improvements you’ve made right away. It can take weeks until implemented edits are noticeable through your ranking - The reason being that user interaction is a big part of how search engines rank you, and you need to give users some time to interact with your content (and Google & co to ‘measure’ it).
HI THERE, I’M NATH
I help entrepreneurs & businesses bring their brand to life through beautiful, strategic branding and web design. See my services to learn more about how I can help you to launch your dream brand and get yourself out there in the wild with an online presence you’re proud to show off!