It will help if you stay on top of your Search Engine Optimization game to keep the traffic flowing on your site.
SEO are the things you do to make your website rank on search engine results for relevant keywords. So, if you own a cake shop based in Brooklyn, it would mean that your website should rank for a keyword like “cake shop in Brooklyn.”
In this post, we will take a closer look at how your web hosting will affect your business’s SEO efforts:
Your Web Host is Your Site’s Home on the Internet
A lot of money is usually spent on on-site design and development. A massive chunk of that marketing budget is also spent on SEO, digital marketing, and PPC to drive more customers to a website.
But in a lot of cases, hosting is often scrimped on. With so many various hosting companies, this can be a mistake since hosting can significantly affect SEO as well.
Therefore, getting cheap hosting for your site is a big mistake. Not only will this hurt your SEO results, but it can impact your marketing efforts as well.
Website Loading Speed
Your site’s loading time can significantly affect your site’s overall user experience. If your site doesn’t load within two seconds, users will likely bounce off your site, hurting your SEO.
In the same way, Google hates slow loading sites.
To boost your site speed, reduce your media files by compressing your site’s images. However, nothing can impact your site speed better than your web hosting.
You can also consider Cloud Hosting or Virtual Private Network to improve your site’s loading speed. A quick loading site will not only delight users but will also have a significant impact on SEO.
To check your website and hosting speed, use the following tools:
- Pingdom
- Google Page Speed
Uptime and Downtime
People would often ask search engines a question. What happens is that the search engine will release a couple of bots to crawl the web, categorize content from sites, and come up with the best answer.
But what will happen if your site is down or intermittently slow? Will it still be accessible to Google? Will Google trust it enough to send users to your site, especially if it’s always down?
Well, the obvious answer is no.
If their site is suffering from frequent downtimes, Google won’t be sending users to your site. If you have a site that’s always slow and unavailable, you won’t be getting results from all your efforts. Search engines will also flag your site as unreliable.
As such, WPHostNZ recommends that you move to a web host with better uptime.
If you have downtimes that last for days rather than minutes, there’s a possibility that Google will delist your site or penalize you.
So, when choosing a hosting web service, check if your web host has an uptime guarantee and how good it is.
Having a 99% uptime means that there’s a possibility that your site is down several days a year. Meanwhile, a 99.99% guarantee means that your site will only be down for several minutes each year.
Website Security
Security breaches have always been a common concern for many online businesses. That’s because it can ruin their relationship with their customers. It can hurt their revenue either.
People will want to do businesses with those who they can trust. Poor web security can significantly hurt your SEO reputation.
You also have to be wary of hackers as well. If not handled properly, they’ll eventually take control of your site. This can result in spammy and malicious content, and harmful backlinks.
That said, browsers and search engines would take preventive measures against compromised websites. This prevents you from generating organic site traffic and leads.
Web Host Location
Despite how interspersed the online world appears to be, a web host’s physical location can also have a massive impact on SEO.
Google constantly checks for the location of users to know what should rank high. By doing so, this automatically pushes businesses within the location of a specific user up to the front page.
Therefore, it makes sense that you get in touch with a hosting web service within the region of your primary target market.
SSL Certifications Build Trust
Ideally, if you want to build trust, your site should have a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
If there isn’t, a nasty pop-up message will alert users of the potential danger of interacting with your site. As a result, they’ll run off to your competitors instead.
Having a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certification is what you need to get that HTTPS. Although there are web hosts that already include SSL certification for free, some will require you to obtain it through third-party providers.
Also, not having an SSL Certification will cause you to be penalized and even scaring off potential leads.
Reliable Backup
Even the most minor loophole might expose your site to hackers and other damaging elements on the internet.
Here are a couple of the things that can happen:
- Your site might be hacked.
- It might lead you to lose your data.
- The reputation of your brand or site might be destroyed, and rebuilding it will take years.
- Personal information might be leaked.
- You’ll miss goals and deadlines if you don’t have a reliable backup.
The most significant benefit of having a reliable hosting plan is that you’ll get to have regular backups of your data. Although you can purchase plugins for your backups, performing these backups manually can still be a hassle.
Even if you installed a trustworthy backup plugin, a backup issue could be frustrating.
A web hosting that does these routine backups will help you from these possible scenarios from happening.
As a result, you can protect the Google rankings that you’ve worked so hard to achieve.
Proper Website Caching
Proper caching of your site affects your SEO in more ways than you can imagine.
You may be doing things right, like regular site audit and optimization, but it will be meaningless if you have a slow page load speed.
Sometimes, there’s an issue with the caching. Your cache will gather in some parts of your C-panel, which will significantly reduce your site speed.
Although you need to do manual caching from time to time, a great hosting plan will remove that hassle.
Database Connection Failure
If your site visitors see an Internal Server Error message, it means your server is already overloaded with traffic.
Although this won’t affect your SEO score as much, it can push your bounce rates up. That’s why you need to come up with a cached copy of your site, so there’s no need for users to connect with the database stored with your host.
If you’re on WordPress, then one of the simplest ways you can do this is download WP Super Cache for free.
In the long run, though, you might want to upload your current hosting plan and upgrade your marketing game with SEO.
Data errors can result because you don’t have enough bandwidth to deal with all the traffic you’re getting. Therefore, ask your hosting provider whether you need to scale to a cloud hosting plan or with a VPS.
Shared hosting might be a cost-effective option, but it often hosts multiple websites on a shared server. So, never compromise the quality of the hosting.
Google doesn’t prefer sites hosted on a shared server either since it is against SEO ethics. Apart from that, the most significant disadvantage of shared hosts is spam.
Once search engines penalize spammy websites, they’ll also penalize every site that’s on that IP address. That can include your website if you’re using a shared hosting plan.
If you’re worried that this can cause your SEO’s poor performance, all you need to do is check. Use the Reverse IP Domain Check tool, enter your URL to see who else is sharing your IP address.
Incorrect TLD
As much as you can, your site should use a .com top-level domain.
Chances are, people will always assume that you’re using it when they look up your site online. If your site ends with a .net or a .co, they might have difficulty looking up your site.
However, the sad reality is the best .com site names are taken. But fortunately, there’s still a tradeoff. Whatever you decide, ensure that the website name you stick with is short and memorable.
Don’t make it too obscure, especially if you can’t secure a .com address.
What can You Do?
One great thing about web hosting is that switching hosts is quick and easy.
But before blindly switching to a new web host, you should do your research. Check out reviews, look up features, as well as the pricing. Also, consider the factors which we have stated above.
Does the web host you are eyeing have an excellent backup? Do they offer SSL certificates?
There are various hosting companies to choose from. So, take time to consider your web host carefully.
Need help with your website or marketing? Take a look at our affordable SEO services and give us a call today. We’d be honored to work for you!
