- November 21, 2025
Every so often, you make a change to your own site that reminds you how important the basics are. Recently, I moved my personal website from a shared hosting setup to a VPS. Nothing complicated, just a cleaner and more dedicated environment.
The improvement was clearly noticeable. Googlebot picked up the faster response times within a few days and rewarded the site with more crawl activity and much smoother patterns in Search Console.
Average server response times, which sit close to TTFB, now land around 320ms to 350 milliseconds. Before the migration, they were much higher and far more inconsistent. The site now feels quicker, smoother and far more stable to use.
Image above Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Stats
What stands out is that none of this required deep technical work. No custom caching setup (well, a little), no template rewrites, no endless tweaks to edge cases. The bulk of the improvement came from leaving a crowded shared environment and moving to a small VPS with dedicated resources.
It is an important reminder not to underestimate what a simple hosting migration can achieve. For many sites, especially smaller ones, upgrading hosting can deliver more meaningful gains than spending dozens of hours trying to claw back a few hundred milliseconds of TTFB or LCP.
Better servers lead to smoother performance. Smoother performance leads to healthier crawl behaviour. That usually translates into more consistent organic visibility.
Sometimes the simplest and cheapest changes make the biggest difference. If you need help with a web hosting migration or site speed optimisation, get in touch.
