How Web Hosting Affects Your SEO: Best Practices and Tips
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:
- Products you sell
- Services you provide
- Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience
The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on.
Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients, or an audience that keeps coming back.
Why Is SEO So Important?
Before diving into how web hosting affects SEO, it’s essential to understand why SEO itself is crucial. With the myriads of tasks at hand, is investing time and resources into SEO really worth it?
The short answer is yes. SEO is one of the most important things you can do to market your business. Here’s why:
Visibility and Reach
Search engines are where the people are.
When looking for information on a specific product they want to buy, 53% of shoppers turn to a search engine.
SEO helps you get into their search results.
Traffic and Conversion
It’s not enough to be on page two of the results or even halfway down the first page. Most searchers don’t scroll that far.
Research shows that 27.6% of all users click the first Google result. The second spot gets 15.8% of traffic, and the third gets 11%.
How Does Web Hosting Affect Your SEO?
Web hosting may not be the most well-known component of SEO, but it’s an important one. To be favored by Google, your site needs to function well, and your hosting company can help with that (or prevent that from happening).
Site Speed and Load Times
A potential customer finds you on Google and clicks the link. How long do you think they’ll wait for the page to load before bouncing and choosing a different search result? If you said several seconds or more, you might be overestimating their patience.
Fast loading times increase the chances that a website visitor makes a purchase. A site that loads in one second has a conversion rate three times higher than a site that loads in five seconds. Having a fast site can also improve your place on the search engine results page. Google confirmed site speed as a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile results.
Your choice of web host is a significant factor that can affect your website’s speed and load time. Shared hosting in India, for example, might be a cost-effective solution but often shares resources among multiple users, potentially slowing down your site.
Server Downtime
Server downtime affects SEO in several ways. If a search engine crawls your website when it’s down, you might get temporarily de-indexed. Google has been known to crawl a site less frequently if it experiences downtime, which isn’t good for SEO.
Minimizing server downtime is crucial. Choosing a cheap web host with a solid uptime guarantee can ensure that server downtime is a rare issue.
Location
When you’re choosing a host, look at where the company’s servers are located. Servers located closer to most of your audience offer better site speeds, which is important for SEO. Location can also affect the data storage regulations you have to comply with, which matters for SEO because noncompliance could lead to forced downtime.
Type of Hosting
Several kinds of hosting are available, and the one you choose can impact your SEO.
- Free Hosting: Options like Wordpress.com or Wix might be acceptable for a personal website but aren’t good for SEO or your brand. You usually can’t have your own domain name, and your site won’t perform well enough to handle high traffic.
- Shared Hosting: Shared hosting in India is a typical starting point for small websites due to its cost-effectiveness. However, it shares resources with other users on the same server. If one of the sites on your server gets a big traffic spike, it could slow your site down.
- VPS (Virtual Private Server): With VPS hosting, you’re still sharing a physical server with other websites, but you have a virtual partition all to yourself. This improves performance and reduces the chance that another website’s traffic can affect your loading speed and SEO.
- Cloud Hosting: With cloud hosting, your website is spread across multiple remote servers. If one of the servers has an issue, the other servers on the network take over. Cloud hosting is great for ensuring high uptime, which is good for SEO.
- Dedicated Hosting: Hosting on a dedicated server is just what it sounds like — the whole server is dedicated to you. This means more uptime and faster speeds. You also have complete control over your server’s settings, so you can make sure your site performs well. Dedicated hosting is good for SEO, but it can be an expensive option. Unless you have an enterprise-sized website, you probably don’t need it.
How To Choose the Best Host for SEO
Now you understand how hosting affects SEO and why your choice of server is a very underappreciated SEO factor. But how do you choose a host that will boost your rankings, traffic, and conversions? As you look for hosting, keep these factors in mind.
Type of Host
Are you looking to keep costs low with a shared host, or do you want the higher performance of a VPS provider? Make sure you know what kind of hosting plan you’re signing up for. Keep in mind that there can be overlap between the host types we outlined above.
Pricing Structure
The cost of your hosting plan doesn’t affect your SEO, of course, but it’s something to consider. Is it worth paying a bit more for a solution that will help you climb the Google results page, or will you go for the cheapest option? Even if you invest in a different area of SEO, a hosting service that doesn’t ensure you have a fast and secure website with minimum downtime will be in your way.
Accessible Support
It’s 2:00 AM, and you realize your website is down. You’re losing overseas sales by the minute and worried about your SEO.
Does your hosting service have a customer hotline at this hour?
Better yet, do you have a managed hosting team constantly monitoring your website?
CDN
Finally, determine if your hosting solution offers a content delivery network or CDN. CDNs can be provided by a hosting company, but they’re a separate service designed to speed up your website. A CDN works by caching static assets like images, CSS and JS files, web fonts, and more in data centers around the world. Creating this cache speeds up content delivery and makes your website load faster.
It does this by shortening the physical distance required for the data to travel. It can also help lower your time to first byte (TTFB), the measurement of how long a browser has to wait before receiving its first byte of data from the server. The result is a faster website; as you know by now, site speed is essential for search engine optimization.
Conclusion
Investing in the right web hosting solution is crucial for optimizing your website’s performance and, consequently, your SEO.
While shared hosting in India and other cheap web host options can be attractive due to their affordability, they come with limitations that can affect your site's speed, uptime, and overall SEO performance.
Choosing a high-quality web host with features tailored for performance can significantly improve your site’s load times, reduce downtime, and enhance user experience, all of which contribute to better SEO rankings.
Prioritizing these factors will help attract more visitors, increase conversions, and ultimately, drive the success of your online presence.
