Does Web Hosting Affect SEO?

Staring your own website is an exciting prospect and regardless of what it is, all websites require hosting to allow it to be served online and have users gain access to your site. Web hosting is a very important part of the website management but many site owners do not give it much thought. They're focused on the product they're creating and rightly so, the best hosting provider is the one you never need to consider. There are a number of hosting options available today suited to suits of various sites and the services they offer. 

While web hosting isn't something you should be too concerned about, I often get asked what the best option is for those looking to get and hold on to top Google rankings.

All hosting options are not created equal and have their cost versus benefit so I thought it would be a good idea to run through them and give you an overview of how Webhosting can affect your organic rankings.

Be a good host

A website that is hosted on an unreliable service or a plan that is not able to scale effectively is destined to become a disaster and could undo all your hard work building a solid amount of traffic. 

Now that you know more about web hosting you can make the best decision for your site, your needs and your budget.

Server downtime

Downtime is the first test and ultimately the most important test for any web host. If you suffer from frequent downtime, it is the first sign of a non-reliable web host. Downtime not only affects a website’s overall performance, but it also brings down its SERP and SEO.

A website is down will have a high bounce rate and to Google, this is a bad experience for users. Even if you have the best content Google will continue to demote you in favour of sites with better response times.

Google realises that downtime is part of every site and does make allowances for it but having a 97% - 99% uptime for your website is the ideal marker. If it goes any higher than that, its time to switch packages or providers.

Page load time

The second most important factor would be how well your web host serves your pages to your audience. Research has shown that if a website takes more than three seconds to load, visitors are more likely to switch to the next possible option. This behaviour is especially true for mobile users and why your site needs to render at the industry standard.

The higher the load time, even a few fractions of a second will lead to a higher bounce rate that affects directly on its search engine rankings.

A reliable web host decreases a website’s load time by using latest caching technologies that result in a high volume of traffic. Remember, reduced load time means a superior experience which more web views over time.

The limitations of shared hosting

The majority of smaller websites you use today run on shared hosting. Shared hosting is a cost-effective way to get your website up and running and is great for low traffic sites with minimal resources to load.

Issues can arise when your website begins to scale and shared hosting simply cannot keep up with the demand for traffic and resources needed to be loaded.

If you notice your page speed decrease or traffic gets sent to maintenance pages for load balancing. Then its time you upgrade to your an owned server or using cloud services.

Shared hosting also runs the risk of being caught up in issues with sites on the server. A neighbouring site could become compromised and bring down sites on that server. If security is important to you and your customers and you want to avoid data breach possibilities then opt for setting up your personalised hosting.

Local is "lekker"

The location of your server plays a vital part in providing your website visitors with a swift browsing experience. Having a server location close to target audience results in faster redirection of an audience to your site.

Server location has a small role in web page load time too. If the server location is near to the web audience, it will fetch data quickly as the download speed will be relatively faster compared with a distant server location.

Every website has an IP address that directly relates to the geographical location of your website. Choosing a local host will make it easy to target the local audience which will help your sites local search engine rankings.

If you don't have the option of local serving because your clients are global you can try and use a cloud services provider/CDN. The CDN will use the closest servers to your visitor's location to provide the best results.

Contact us

If you're still unsure as to which hosting service would suit you, or need to know more about digital marketing for your business, then don’t be shy we’ re happy to assist. Simply contact us

Are you looking to promote your business?

South African Business owners can create your free business listing on nichemarket. The more information you provide about your business, the easier it will be for your customers to find you online. Registering with nichemarket is easy; all you will need to do is head over to our sign up form and follow the instructions.

If you require a more detailed guide on how to create your profile or your listing, then we highly recommend you check out the following articles. 

• How to create a nichemarketer profile 
• How to create a nichemarket business listing 

Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on SEO.

• Why Your Homepage Is Holding Back Your Organic Rankings
• How To Rank For Highly Competitive Keywords
• 10 Reasons Why Your Site Doesn't Rank For *Insert Keyword*
• What Does An SEO Optimised eCommerce Product Detail Page Look Like
• Is Pushing Live Too Many Pages Risky For SEO

Tags: Web Hosting, SEO