The Importance of Web Hosting For SEO
The importance of web hosting for SEO can never go unnoticed. The success of a company is directly associated with the volume of traffic it generates on its website. People these days are impatient. They don’t wait more than a couple of seconds for a webpage to load. They will avoid linking your website to their social media channels due to the slow load time, thus leading to you lose major business.
By choosing the wrong service provider, you can not only have a negative impact on your income but you can also face security and malware attacks. This can be a major problem if you are providing an online service to the user and storing user data. A poor web hosting plan can cause an extreme susceptibility to the website and may cause trespassers to access your website’s protected storage data.
Some hosting providers flood their servers completely to make maximum money, reducing the overall quality of the website resulting in poor user experience. You can’t control your web hosting provider but what you can do is choose a reliable, fast and reputed web hosting service provider. Cheap web hosting providers may offer you a low price, but they are mostly unreliable and will give a relatively slow performance. A poor web hosting provider generates a poor SEO ranking. There are couple of other things you can do to increase the speed of your website, like optimising the databases, not using video on auto play, caching static content and compressing images.
Search engines don’t appreciate poor performing websites and they believe websites with poor performance deserve less encouragement in search results. People often don’t correlate their web hosting provider and SEO but we list some of the factors here which will clearly illustrate that website performance and speed have a direct impact on your SEO procedures and practices.
Page Loading Time
The page load time and the bounce rate are directly proportional. Your conversion rates are severely hurt by slow page load times. Page load times depend on server and development. Make sure the quality code is the topmost priority of your developer at every stage of website development and updating. Search engines have started using modern machine algorithms to detect which websites offer good experience. If your website is slow to load in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page), the search engine will push it down since they are responsible for providing the user with quality experience only.
Search engines are elusive about the factors that comprise their algorithms but in 2010, Google plainly mentioned page loading time as a key SEO metric. The strength of a server is determined by how quickly they generate web pages and process databases. If you are sure that everything is perfect at your end and your website is still not being loaded in two seconds, it’s time to talk to your web hosting provider.
Location of the Server
The location of the server is of key importance, especially when the websites have a generic Top level domain (TLD), such as .com, .net or .gov, and when the webmaster has not enabled the Geographic Targeting Feature by Google.
The servers should be located in a matching locality in case any technical difficulty arises. In some cases, the company may have no absolute connection with the location of the data centre but may achieve high rankings for highly competitive keywords for the same location. If you want to target your local audience, using the native language and content of your country will surely give a boost to your website ranking. Make sure you think about the location before hiring a web hosting provider. You don’t want your SEO efforts to go to waste by optimising a website that cannot reach its potential.
Uptime and Downtime of the Servers
The search engine tries uninformed access to your website several times in a day to check if your website is up and running. If your webpage is inaccessible due to a server problem, you can expect your ranking to go down. Search engines avoid displaying dead results to maintain their credibility. Search engines monitor a website’s uptime and performance before referring it to their users. You have to prove yourself knowledgeable, professional and responsible in view of the search engines to maintain your ranking.
Some search engines, like Google, have recently started overlooking temporary downtime but longer downtimes can gravely affect your ranking as they do not let the crawlers reach it. Remember, once your website is gone from the index, it’s going to take massive hard work to get it back to its previous ranking. The best hosting provider will keep you updated about your site’s status. You can find everything, from uptime to suspicious logins, through these notifications. However, to be honest, downtime is inevitable but make sure your hosting provider guarantees at least 99.9% uptime.
Avoid Shared Hosting
The best solution to minimise page load time is to choose a dedicated server but if it is out of your budget, you can choose a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in which the service provider delivers dedicated resources with certain restrictions. This is a middle ground between dedicated and shared servers.
In shared hosting, you share the server with many other websites. In case if any one of them attracts more traffic than the normal level, you are going to suffer the consequences with a super slow loading time. If your budget can fit in shared servers only, make sure your web hosting provider is good at managing the servers and doesn’t punish you with frequent errors or crashes, which will drive visitors away.
The ‘Optimise Your Website’ Feature
Since optimisation has become the lifeline of website traffic and conversions, many of the web hosting companies now provides the extra benefit of proper optimisation so that your website is not penalised for small errors that are easily fixable. However, they cannot be compared to the techniques of an experienced Search Engine Optimiser.
