Server location, and considerations in moving host

[themistral]

Hi all,

I have recently taken a new job providing digital marketing for my employer.
I've noticed that the web hosting plan they have is in the US. They have a .co.uk TLD but I was wondering if in this day and age moving the website to a UK host would help to improve our UK rankings?

I was also wondering if moving an established website (6 years) would be detrimental either short or long term?

Does anyone have any recent experiences with this issue?

Thanks!

[justpassing]

Since the site a .co.uk, it already tells Google (and other search engine) that the main audience should be UK. This would be different if it was a genreic tld like .com.

Now, there are benefits from hosting in the UK. You will divide by 10 the latency for UK visitors. Which is good for visitors, and "might" be good for your ranking.

The sensible part is changing the IP of the site (excepting if you are already using frontends , or services like Cloudflare).

[robzilla]

I was also wondering if moving an established website (6 years) would be detrimental either short or long term?

No, why would it? Not unless you break something along the way.

Will it improve your rankings? Wouldn't count on it, at least not directly, but the reduced latency will improve the user experience, and that could theoretically feed back into your rankings. I don't see a downside to it anyway (so long as you choose a decent hosting provider).