How to Shift to New URL when Moving Your Website Hosting

Moving to a new website hosting company is a tedious task. More so if you are also shifting to a new URL. By taking a few necessary precautionary steps, you can ensure your visitors are able to find you site, thereby minimizing traffic related losses that are bound to happen during this stage.

So, you have decided to move your website hosting to another provider and also shift to a new URL. But have you taken necessary precautions to ensure your shift to the new web address does not drive away your visitors?

Well, there is an entire checklist of ‘things to do’ that you need to consider. By taking care of some important points, you can minimize the loss of visitors coming to your website even when you are moving to a new web hosting company.

If your web server has logs or a statistics counter that tracks referrals to your website, you should use that information to make a list of all the sources that send visitors to your pages. Once you have changed your URL, you can keep going back to these sites to see if they are still referring to your old URL. If so, you can write to the webmaster asking him to update your URL information.

In case you have submitted your URL to online directories, you will have to go back to each one of them and take the trouble to update them. On major search engines, search for links pointing to your old URL and manually go back to each one of them to get updations done.

Since you need to go and check the URLs manually in most of the places, these updates can take more time than you think. For the transition to be smooth, you have to continue to maintain your old website hosting account where you can set up redirections to your new URL. However, be prepared that you will end up losing some people on the way; webmasters of some websites will never be reachable and will continue to display your old URL, thereby directing people to your old site.

Apart from updating your URL on third party websites, you would obviously want to put a redirection page to direct your visitors to your new location. This could be in the form of a page that simply gives a link to your new site, asking visitors to click and reach the new link. However, the problem with this approach is that many online users will not bother to follow links. If they do not get to see your site instantly, they might just hit the ‘back’ button and proceed elsewhere.

Therefore, when you decide to shift to another URL while moving to a new web host, you should weigh the pros and cons and be aware of the impact it can have on your website traffic. The best thing you can do is to seek help from a professional web hosting company like Aussie Web Host, one of the most trusted names in hosting services in Australia.