You’ve probably noticed many webmasters put extra emphasis on the importance of choosing the right web hosting provider. When asked why, they may tell you it’s for SEO. So that begs the question: How can a web hosting provider affect your website’s SEO?
It’s important to realize the qualities of good SEO make up the qualities of a good website. If you follow the principles of good SEO, it stands to reason that you probably have a pretty good website. The backbone of a good website all lays in the hands of its web hosting provider. After all, you can’t say it’s a good website if it takes a long time to load or is plagued by malware, right?
Let’s see in depth how a web hosting provider can affect your website’s SEO:
Availability
Search engines (and visitors) like a website always available. If your website is down while it’s crawled by a search engine, it often results in a drop in ranking. If your website is down frequently, that drop in rating may be permanent. Additionally, every time your site is down you miss out on any visitors that may have tried your site while it was down. These visitors may not even return to your site later, assuming that your website doesn’t exist any more.
Of course, uptime depends on your web hosting provider and you. However, you can’t keep a website up when the web hosting provider has stability issues with their servers or internet connection. So it is vital that the web hosting provider have as much uptime as possible, with 100% uptime being the ideal.
Speed
Another way search engines rate websites is by testing how fast it takes the website to render a page. A slow web host can be suicide in this aspect, no matter what you do to improve your website’s speed, because your website depends on the web host’s computing power and internet speed. It’s okay to have the occasional slow down due to heavy traffic, but if your web pages are consistently slow to render, it can also result in a permanent drop in your website’s SEO rating.
Visitors like a page that instantly pops up because it gives a sense of professionalism and safety in browsing your site. Also, they don’t like to wait for a page to render, and if your website is extra slow, it may even throw up an error instead of loading the webpage. If this happens frequently, it can frustrate your visitors to the point of no return.
Safety
Visitors want to know they’re safe visiting your website, and it is not going to give them any malware or a virus. If you run e-commerce on your website, safety is also important to you in terms of protecting your customers’ private data and their machines. No one wants to deal with malware or hackers while they shop or browse.
If a web host doesn’t keep hackers and malware off their servers, it can result in a low SEO ranking with search engines because they regularly scan websites for security issues and avoid displaying websites known to be problematic. A website riddled with security issues and/or malware can find itself not showing up in search engines at all due to it being unsafe for visitors to go to. Search engines are serious about protecting their visitors from malicious websites, and so should your web hosting provider.
HTTPS/SSL
Google now factors SSL in as an SEO factor, which helps ensure the security of visitor’s data while they are on your website. This also factors into how secure your web hosting provider is. Many web hosting providers are offering free SSL certificates to their clients, and yours should be no exception to this rule.
If you do find yourself with a web hosting provider that doesn’t provide SSL, all hope is not lost. You can create your own certificate for free via Let’s Encrypt.
Location
The location of your web hosting provider’s servers greatly impacts the speed of your website. It also influences your SEO depending on where it’s located. If your web hosting provider’s servers are located in India, for example, and your audience is in the United States, it can lower your SEO score. However, having your web pages served by a location close to your audience improves your SEO score due to its page rendering speed and its convenience. Additionally, different countries are ranked according to their amount of infrastructure, with some countries like the United States being ranked first and other countries like India being ranked lower.
Shared Hosting
This is rare, but if you happen to share a server with a neighbor serving up spam or phishing pages, it can lower the SEO ranking of your website just by sharing the same IP address range. So make sure that your web hosting provider has a policy against these types of websites strictly enforced. The last thing you want is to have your website associated with malicious websites designed to upload malware, spam, or phish.
Your Hosting Provider Is Your Lifeline To Great SEO
With all these factors at play with SEO, you can’t afford to lose out by having your website hosted by a provider that doesn’t take these aspects seriously. Why build a website and work at building up fantastic SEO to only have it ruined by your web hosting provider? Such acts make no sense when you look at them from that perspective. So make sure when you are choosing a web hosting provider that they are a provider that supports your SEO efforts.
Hosting.Review is a web hosting review site that takes all these factors into consideration when ranking web hosting providers. It can make an excellent resource to use in your search. Don’t fall for a web hosting provider’s promises until you have had a chance to check out the truth via those who have been customers and share their experiences online.
