Does hosting affect SEO? Many businesses who are planning to host their website might be in search of an answer to this question. That is because, SEO in the present-day world, plays a key role in helping brands to build an online presence. Getting ranked on the first page of the search engine results can help brands generate more clicks and traffic to their website. So, in short, the answer to the question is “Yes, hosting can have a significant impact on your website SEO”.
With this blog, we will discuss how web hosting can impact website performance and SEO rankings.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is the process of making your website search engine friendly, thereby getting your website on top of the search engine’s results page. An increase in website traffic, improved online visibility, better sales and revenue are some of the benefits businesses get by making their website rank on the first page of the search engine results.
What is Web Hosting?
Hosting a webpage or website on the internet by an organization or individual is called web hosting. The Web hosting service provider helps to host your website, by providing the services and technologies that need for your site to be viewed on the internet. Websites are all hosted on servers so that anybody who has access to the internet can find a website by browsing the domain name or website address.
Does Hosting Affect SEO Ranking?
Your web host won’t offer any direct support for your website to get ranked in the top position on a search engine results page. So how does hosting affect SEO, if your web host doesn’t have any direct role to play in the search engine optimization of your website?
There are a number of factors related to hosting that affect the SEO of your website. Users in today’s digital era, prefer fast and smooth websites. Since loading time influences user experience, search engines such as Google consider website performance as a ranking factor. A fast and high-performance website having quality and relevant content can easily outrank a website that takes lots of time to load. And your hosting server can have a direct impact on your website loading speed, thus making it vital to choose a reliable web host for your website.
Let’s take a quick look at how your web hosting can help you in achieving good results in search engine ranking.
Factors Affecting Website Ranking
1. The server location
Hosting server locations can have a significant impact on your SEO performance. It is recommended that you host your website on servers that are close to your visitors. The closer your website visitors are to your server, the lesser the latency.
Other than that, search engines also consider server location in determining the websites that need to be listed for a local search query that the user makes. For example, Suppose you are doing a local business in your country and you host your website on servers located in some other country. If a user makes a local search query from your country, then there are chances that the search engine won’t include your website in the search results they will show to the user who made the query. This is because search engines are considering host server locations as a ranking factor for local search results.
Even if you are lucky enough to have your website shown to the user, the location of the server will have a direct impact on your website loading speed. The more the distance between your server and the user, the more will be the latency. i.e the website will take more time to load.
2. Server Downtime
There can be chances that a server goes through downtime. Web server downtime can have a significant impact on your website performance and SEO. Frequent server downtime can cause the bounce rates to increase. Search engines consider bounce rate as a ranking factor when populating the SERP. Let’s explain this with the help of an example.
When search engines receive a query that is related to your webpage, they will display your website in the SERP. Unfortunately, your website is currently down and not available. Without knowing this, the user clicks on your website. However, it doesn’t load, making the user leave the page immediately. This will cause the bounce rate to increase. If this keeps on continuing, the bounce rate will gradually increase and reach a very high value. Search engines such as Google treat high bounce rates as an important ranking factor. A high bounce rate can cause your website ranking to drop, thereby affecting your website traffic and sales.
3. Secured Hosting
Along with server availability and server location, server security is also a ranking factor for search engines. At present Google and other search engines prioritize the websites that are secure, such as those which are SSL certified.
To secure your website, you may take all the necessary steps. However, the overall security of your website mainly depends on security services and features offered by your web host. Hence, it is advised that you choose a web host who gives great importance to server security so that your website may not get affected by any malware attacks. Such attacks can have a long-term impact on your website SEO and rankings.
4. Tech Support
Even though tech support doesn’t have a direct impact on SEO ranking, it still plays a crucial role in ensuring your website’s availability. Server downtimes can happen anytime, even if your web host is good at providing the hosting services. In the event of any downtime, it is important that your hosting provider is available to get the issue resolved and get your website back live quickly. So while choosing a hosting provider, make sure to check if they offer the right technical support.
Qualities of a Good Web Host
Getting ranked on the first page of the search engine results page is a challenging task. There are different SEO strategies that companies use to make their website SEO friendly and get ranked on the SERP. However, along with all those strategies, it is equally important that you select the right web host. It makes you feel sure that you aren’t lagging behind in terms of website performance and user experience.
User experience and website performance are crucial that can ensure better SEO ranking and web authority. Hence choosing the right web host is the first step towards having an SEO-friendly website.
A good web host should provide the best SEO friendly hosting solution that includes,
- Reliable, fast, and secured hosting that helps keep your website up and running 24/7
- A great content delivery system
- Scalable services that are capable of handling traffic surges.
- More regions and availability zones that will help you to choose locations that are close to your end-users.
These are some of the basic features that every web host should offer. If you are in search of a web host who can offer all these features at an affordable price, you can get in touch with us. Cloudington offers managed cloud hosting services that are reliable and provides the best performance for your website.
Check out our managed WordPress hosting services to select the package that suits your requirements.
Summary
Your website plays a key role in helping you boost your sales and revenue. Having a great online presence in the search engines can help you attract people to your website.
Organizations are applying different SEO strategies to get ranked on the top page of the search results. But many are still not aware of the importance of hosting and how poor hosting can impact their website SEO ranking.
Uptime, security, loading time, and server response time are some of the factors that affect the SEO ranking of a website. Hence choosing the right web hosting that suits your business needs should be a priority.
Read AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud article to know the factors to consider while choosing a cloud platform for hosting your website.
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