It may happen that, at some point, you decide to migrate your website to a new WordPress hosting . Whether for economic reasons, for aspects related to the WPO (essential for SEO) or for the quality of its technical support.
You should know that this process is very delicate since, if you do not take into account what I am going to tell you here, you can lose SEO positioning along the way.
I am convinced that this is not your goal. So pay attention and discover how to migrate a web page from one server to another without affecting your relationship with search engines.
Take this into account before migrating your website
When migrating a web page from one hosting to another, various situations may arise that end up affecting SEO. Our main objective will be to avoid them, but also, why not, make decisions that favor it.
This is what happened in the project of one of my clients, where the need arose to migrate the website to another domain.
The reason that led to it was that the keyword of the domain did not allow expanding the themes of the web at the time of positioning other keywords that were not closely related to it.
However, whether we are going to change only hosting or hosting and domain, it is necessary to take into account several aspects.
- Loss of Domain Authority (DA)
When the migration is double, that is, we are going to migrate hosting and domain, DA can be lost. This will have to be transferred to the new domain little by little.
If your migration is done right, you’ll not only recover faster than starting from scratch, you’ll outperform.
- Missing meta titles
During the migration, the meta titles of your pages may disappear. We must be aware of this so that, in case this happens, we can act in time and correct it.
- Redirection to the new domain
To make it easier for your users to find your website with the new domain, it is recommended to add a 301 redirect.
In this way, all the pages of the old domain will redirect to the new one, thus avoiding loss of direct traffic. And, in addition, with this we will inform Google of the movement.
- Notification to Google
In order not to lose positioning in the migration, we must inform Google of what has happened. We will do this through Search Console. We’ll change the address, submit the sitemap, and wait for the full website to be indexed.
- Free migration service
There are companies that offer the change of hosting for free. If you choose this option you will save future headaches and you will save budget to invest in other aspects that you will need later.
If you’re a web developer, find out how much to charge to migrate a website. Perhaps you can expand your service catalog or offer it for free as an added value to your customers.
How to migrate my website to another hosting?
What do you think if now we enter to see in features we generate how to migrate a website from one hosting to another? You already know what aspects to monitor during the process, but… what does it consist of?
Choose the new hosting
Currently, the offer of hosting services is quite wide. I could go through each of the options out there, but I’m going to recommend one: ANW . Why? Because it is a provider specialized in this CMS, it has an IP in Spain and an SSL security certificate.
transfer files
Does the acronym FTP ring a bell? If not, go investigate. The FTP is the place where the files of your website are and from where you must download them to take them to the new server.
move the database
Next, to migrate a website, it is necessary to export all its information from the server you are leaving to import it into the new one.
This is called database export and import, and you’ll find it in a file called SQL.
Configure your WordPress
You can carry out this process manually or through the plugins that the hosting providers themselves have developed to speed up the process.
Normally, each company has its guided tutorials so that you can execute the configuration correctly.
Point the DNS to the new server
This consists of changing the name of the server in the domain so that it points to the new one. You can do it from the provider’s administration panel or from the domain registrar.
How to migrate my website to another hosting? If you are still asking yourself this question, the ideal is that you delegate the task to a professional. When the operation of your website and your SEO positioning are at stake, it is best to make safe decisions.