Is website SEO performance dependent on good web hosting? Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation about the subject on the internet. Read this article to find out how and why poor web hosting choices can affect your search engine rankings. The online market is growing at a rapid pace every other day. More and more businesses are jumping into the venture. Everyone wants to see their website on the first search engine result page. Modern online businesses need the best SEO to thrive. Otherwise, they do not get noticed.
Web Hosting has to be fast, reliable, and secure. Google is very picky about what it delivers to users. The company wants to provide the pages with the best user experience at lightning-fast speed. Good hosting is a critical need from a usability perspective. The slow pace, poor security, and downtime all are enough to ruin the usability.
Hosting is As Important As Development & SEO
Companies invest a lot of their budget in website development and design. The subsequent SEO, PPC, and digital marketing phases consume even more money. However, they tend to overlook hosting, an equally important subject. Cheap hosting plans surely look attractive but may come with many hidden downsides. Moreover, the slow loading websites also mess up the performance. It slows down the speed and affects your SEO rankings. The result is “losing conversions” and conversions are what you make the website for.
5 Ways Web Hosting Can Influence Your Website SEO Performance
Let us tell you in detail how a good web hosting choice can give you an SEO advantage. Here are the factors that directly impact SEO. So you have to be very careful while choosing the web hosting.
-
Page Speed
We all know that speed is the ranking factor. Google loves the pages that load quickly. Your website should take less than two seconds to load for good search engine ranking and satisfy both search engines and your audiences. For most websites that fail to achieve this speed, bad web hosting is the one to blame.
Do not compromise the speed by opting for the small web host that offers lesser bandwidth than you require. Also, you should be careful about what type of host you pick. The kind of host you choose should align with the type of website. For example, the shared hosting type is a big no if you have a significant news website whose traffic can spike at any time. Make sure you know the needs of your website before you opt for a shared server, VPS server, or dedicated server. You can check the speed of your website from tools like Pingdom and Google Page Speed.
-
Downtime/Uptime
No one else is to blame for downtime but bad hosting in most cases. Downtime is poisonous for search engine rankings. Find the hosting company that guarantees 99.9% uptime. Let us explain why good uptime is critical for better search engine ranking. Google, basically, is an answering engine. The user asks the questions, and Google crawls the web and represents the best answer possible. If it thinks your page answers the question in the best possible way, it will show your page.
But what if your website is down? Google will not be able to access it. Also, they will not trust your website if downtimes are frequent. They will not show your website to the users. It will ruin all your SEO efforts. However, Content delivery networks have almost resolved the downtime issues. Also, we have things like Microsoft Azure or Amazon cloud services.
-
Hosting Limitations
There are many web hosts with weird limitations. For example, some companies do not let their clients access their .htaccess files. Also, some have the limitation of only 1000 redirects. It should be unlimited, theoretically. That may not have any significant impact on SEO. However, the situation can vary depending upon what you want to do with your website. Before choosing, you should ensure they let you do all daily routine tasks.
You Might Also Like to Read: How To Choose The Best Web Hosting Service Provider
-
Location
You will find mixed opinions about whether SEO and website hosting locations have any connection. Some declare it an essential ranking factor, and some maintain that it has nothing to do with website SEO performance. Yes, it has not been proven that search engines use location as a ranking factor. However, there is strong evidence of IP addresses influencing the SEO rankings. Moreover, location also has indirect impacts on SEO. Let us see how.
The locations of users, businesses, and data centers play an essential role. This decides the distance data has to travel. This distance has a direct impact on the page loading speed. If the distance is lesser, the speed gets better. If your target audience is in the UK, you should go for the UK-based data center. If your target audience is in the US, you should go for a US-based data center. And if you have an international audience, you should go for the hosting that provides the fastest Content Delivery Networks. Location far away from the target audience decreases the speed. Search engines do not rank slow websites. Hence, the poor choice of location leads to a poor ranking.
-
Security
Poor security measures can also mess with your SEO efforts. Without proper security and maintenance, even the best content management systems like WordPress can become victims of cyberattacks. The compromised websites lose all their traffic drastically. That leads to losing credibility in the search engines. Google will not trust your website anymore. Even if you had good ranks previously, you would lose your ranking after a cyber attack.
Wrapping It Up
A bad web host can become the biggest hurdle in the way to successful search engine optimization. All the factors we talked about validate the statement. Find a reliable host with good uptime, security, and speed at the most appropriate location. It would help you increase visibility and gain more customers.
Are you looking for such a web host? The Email Shop offers many attractive pricing plans with maximum uptime and security.
For Discount and Offers Visit our Official Twitter Page
