When a business is moving to a new provider for their fibre leased line, or taking up this kind of connectivity for the first time, a common concern is that it will involve a change in IP address which could trigger a detrimental knock-on effect for other important online services.

In fact, the work involved in updating most of your applications with a new IP address is usually minimal and straightforward, as we explain here.

Will a change in IP address affect SEO on my website?

You’ve worked hard on your website’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and your business’s online presence to make sure you appear high in the results  when potential customers search your product or service, so you may be concerned that moving to a new leased line provider and the associated change to your IP address will undermine that work.

Will the change affect your website’s SEO? The answer is, thankfully, no.

Moving to a new leased line provider in itself will not actually affect your website’s IP address at all, because that’s tied to the server your website is hosted on.

What if I do move my website to a new hosting provider?

It’s difficult to say definitively because Google keep their search ranking factors close to their chests, but evidence seems to show that changing your website hosting (and hence the site’s IP address) in itself is not a cause for concern. A good quality web developer will handle the transition for you to ensure it causes as little disruption as possible.

If you’ve made the decision to move to a new hosting provider because you’ve been experiencing problems such as slow site speed or crashes, you may even experience an uplift in your search engine rankings when you move to a more reliable hosting service.

Thinking of moving to a new leased line provider?
Read our guide to comparing providers