According to Google Search Central, switching hosting providers usually won’t hurt your SEO if your URLs stay the same and the move avoids downtime, crawl blocks, and slower page loads.
In plain terms, Google doesn’t give you a ranking bonus for “Host A vs Host B.” What changes is the experience your site delivers and what Googlebot runs into while crawling. If your new server is faster and more stable, the move can help over time. If the site goes down, serves lots of errors, or accidentally blocks crawling, you can see a temporary dip.
If you want the move handled end to end, our team can migrate, monitor, and harden WordPress setups as part of WordPress hosting, so you’re not guessing during DNS changes.
What actually affects SEO during a hosting change
| What can change during a hosting switch | What it can do to SEO | What to check before you flip DNS |
|---|---|---|
| Downtime or lots of 5xx errors | Crawling slows, pages can drop temporarily, and leads stop coming in | Run the new site on a test URL, check pages load, forms submit, and checkout or booking works |
| Robots.txt blocks or accidental noindex | Pages stop getting crawled or indexed | Remove any “block all” rules and confirm your live pages are indexable |
| DNS propagation delays | Some visitors hit old hosting, others hit new hosting for a while | Lower DNS TTL in advance (often a week) and keep the old host live until traffic fully shifts |
| Slower server response time | Worse user behavior and weaker page experience signals | Benchmark speed before and after, then tune caching, image delivery, and PHP or database performance |
| SSL or HTTPS issues | Browser warnings, mixed content, and lost trust, plus technical crawl friction | Install the certificate on the new host, confirm redirect behavior, and fix mixed content |
| Firewall or bot protection blocks | Googlebot may struggle to fetch pages | Allow Googlebot access and confirm it can fetch pages in Search Console |
For Orlando and Central Florida businesses, the biggest practical risk is simple: if your site is down during business hours, you lose calls and form fills, and Google can hit errors while crawling. We usually schedule the DNS cutover in a low demand window and keep the old environment online until logs show traffic has moved over cleanly.
A simple hosting switch checklist we use
- Clone the site to the new server and test the full customer path: homepage, service pages, contact form, booking, payments, and any PDFs.
- Confirm tracking and verification carry over (Search Console ownership methods, analytics tags, pixels).
- Run a crawl of the staging site and fix obvious issues before launch (broken links, missing images, redirect loops).
- Lower DNS TTL ahead of time, then update DNS to point to the new host.
- Watch both old and new server logs, plus Search Console coverage and crawl activity, for the first several days.
- Only cancel the old host after you see that users and bots are no longer requesting it.
If your main concern is performance, this ties directly into how website speed affects SEO, because hosting quality shows up as load time and stability, not as a branding label.
One more note: a hosting switch is different from changing domains or changing URL paths. If you change URLs, you need a redirect plan and extra monitoring, and the risk goes up.
Security matters too. If you’re also adding HTTPS during the move, review whether HTTPS affects SEO so you don’t end up with certificate errors or messy redirect chains.
If you tell us what platform you’re on (WordPress, Shopify, custom) and whether you’re changing anything besides hosting, we can outline the safest migration plan and the exact checks we’d run as part of our SEO work so rankings and leads stay steady.
