Small hosting upgrade

[chainazo]

Well maybe this is a very specific question.
I had a hosting with which I was not very happy because it did not give me good positions.
I changed the hosting, and I improved a lot in positions and I am quite happy now.
But I can't get the position 1 in a word that would be very useful for me to get it.
My question is if I upgrade the plan of the same hosting that offers me: one more core and 50% more RAM, will this make a big difference to achieve that position 1?

I clarify that the content and the theme of wp I consider very important and I give them the attention they deserve and I do not neglect them. But in the hosting aspect I want to see if I can make a difference with what they offer me.

[robzilla]

Your hosting does not really affect your positions unless it's particularly bad, e.g. when the site is frequently inaccessible to users and Googlebot, or too slow to use normally. So it was probably not due to your hosting change that your positions improved, and a further upgrade won't make a difference either.

Still, if an upgrade improves the user experience by making pages load faster, that might make it worthwhile -- just not in terms of your rankings. But with WordPress it's generally better to first look at aggressive caching than to scale up your hosting.

Also, ideally before considering an upgrade you'd know how much of your current plan you're actually using. If you have 2 cores but you're hardly using them, adding another is not going to make much of a difference.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Agreed. Unless the site is noticeably slow for visitors, making it faster is not likely to move the rankings needle. The divide between #1 and #2 is larger than just a few MS of loading time I would think.

I'm often able to go from #2 to #1 simply by making a page more visible. ie: a few well placed internal links to the page, or a few backlinks from related pages... and sometimes just improving the content a bit will be enough.

You need to get an idea of what the divide is between #1 and #2 before you make too many changes, though. Sometimes the other side deserves the spot after years of existance and you won't close the gap overnight.

[RedBar]

I changed the hosting, and I improved a lot in positions and I am quite happy now.

How old is the site?
How long was it on your original hosting?
In which country was your first host?
In which country is your current host?
Are you targetting locally or globally?
How are you checking your rankings?

[Robert Charlton]

RedBar, excellent questions.....

How are you checking your rankings?

This one deserves special attention, as, some time ago, Google changed how it shows results "across borders" to searchers in different countries. You no longer can see those by simply going to the foreign search engine... ie, to the cctld version of Google that matches your query.

I don't have time to find the reference now, but a reminder of what changes Google made might help a lot of people, I think, who are having trouble with international SEO.

[tangor]

Changing hosts (from bad neighborhoods) generally has a greater impact on increasing rank values than adding more speed on same. Once had a great host as far as my site operation was concerned but over time their list of site clients changed toward the "dark side"---and that impacted all. Moved to a different host and the shortcomings disappeared. (with a bit of lag involved)