Your website’s hosting is a critical element to your web business’s success. The performance of your web hosting service will impact your website’s SEO, traffic and commercial performance. Search engines want to share relevant websites that will provide search users with a positive experience. 😀
How does Hosting Affect Your Website’s SEO ?
Not only can partnering with the wrong web host be detrimental to your site’s SEO performance, but also to your site’s security and uptime connectivity. It’s important for businesses to understand the importance of website functionality through web hosting solutions. Below are a few of the major factors businesses need to consider when selecting their web hosting partner.
How can web hosting hurt your site’s SEO?
Page loading speed
Web page loading times contribute to one of the 200 factors in the search engine algorithm. The web hosting provider and plan that you choose to go with it is crucial since the hosting performance of the provider will account for majority of your site’s web speed.
You may also choose to use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve the content delivery to web users. This works by associating the website to a CDN which will cache the content so it can load faster into a web user’s browser. This may result in improving the web page speed to 2 seconds or less. (This is pretty quick and favourable with search engines)
Site storage
You need to ensure that the hosting plan that you choose will allow you to store your website’s content successfully. If you will be running a website that is data heavy with media objects such as images, videos and audio files, then you will need a solution that gives you enough storage to keep everything on the server. Depending on the type of hosting option you go for, you will have different limits available to you when it comes to hosting options.
Website security
Website security is easily overlooked and can not only damage your SEO campaign efforts, but cause further damage to your site’s experience and uptime. Since there are so many threats on the web, it is vital that you choose a web hosting option that will protect your website from viruses, hackers, malware and other security loopholes that your website’s hosting or your website might have.
Some important things to consider include:
● Is your website’s theme clean and up to date?
● Are the servers that your site will be hosted on free from any security threats?
● Does your website hosting provider offer 24 hour support, seven days a week in the case that your security is compromised and you require support to get the site live as quickly as possible.
● If your website will be using any databases, will the database platform be up to date?
Additionally, you should ask your web hosting provider what software and management practices they adopt to prevent the threat of security breaches. You can ask them:
● If they use firewalls to protect the content on the server from falling victim to security attacks.
● Will your site sit on its own cpanel or will it be shared with others?
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is important as you want to make sure people can access your website if there is a lot of traffic hitting the site. In terms of SEO, if your site is receiving a high volume of traffic from search queries and your site fails to load up, this will signal high bounce rates to Google which can negatively impact your visibility in the search results.
Web hosting is a critical factor to get right since it impacts your site’s user experience and SEO. There are several threats on the web that can sabotage your SEO efforts overnight. Partner with a high quality web hosting service provider that can offer you the technical support that you need to ensure your SEO campaign will have the best platform to be successful. 🙂
