Yes, web hosting does have an impact on SEO. It all depends on the company whose web hosting services you are going to use. The web hosting provider also has a direct effect on your website ranking across search engines. Thus, you must evaluate your web hosting on multiple parameters beyond costs.
Factors like uptime/downtime and speed can impact your SEO, as it may vary from month to month. So, you need to review and evaluate the uptime commitment regularly. Your web hosting provider should be able to react and resolve your issues quickly. Also, one more important consideration is the payment cycle that your web hosting offers.
So, the following are 4 major web hosting factors that can have an impact on your website rankings and SEO-
- Uptime/Downtime Downtime depicts the amount of time your website remains inaccessible due to problems on the hosting server. Search engine spiders regularly visit a website and if they find that the website has been suffering downtime, these spiders will bounce and hop on to another website. If the spiders see this happening on a regular basis, then the website is marked as ‘unreliable,’ resulting in direct down gradation of website rankings. The search engines are unwilling to display unreliable websites in their SERPs as the searchers can click on such results and then are unable to access it. A committed uptime of 99% means that the website remains inaccessible for nearly 7 hours over a period of one month. Ideally, a user wants to have an accessible website; there are still slight downtime chances, even with the most premium web hosting plans. A trusted web hosting provider ensures your website with a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%.
- Page Loading Speeds In 2010, Google clearly announced that page loading speed is one of the important factors determining a website’s SEO. Though, it is one of the several factors having quite a low contribution towards determining the ranking and SEO of a website. As a website owner, you must consider this factor as well. A slower-loading website might not be purely due to the web hosting provider. It can be a result of the configuration of coding performed on the website. If the website has been technically set up and well-optimized, you should definitely intervene and ask your web hosting provider to change the existing website server to another one. It is common for a website to share multiple resources with other sites. More resources result in more sharing of resources, thus making the website slower. Migrating your website to a server with lesser tenants or on a dedicated server could result in enhanced website loading speeds.
You can check the webpage loading speed by visiting any of the following-
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights
- http://tools.pingdom.com
- Avoid Shared Hosting Shared hosting might be a cost-effective option as the server resources get distributed amongst other tenants/users in the servers. Shared hosting can be an excellent web hosting choice if you need to host multiple websites. However, search engines like Google usually don’t prefer websites hosted on a shared server, considering it is against SEO ethics. Shared hosting also accounts for a lot of spam. Since a shared hosting server has several systems, the web hosting provider needs to address everyone present on the server, even the spam users. Such websites with spam have a direct impact on your website’s ranking, authority, and credibility. Most of the shared hosting providers usually don’t offer higher speed, reliability, and scalability than dedicated hosting. Also, there are weak security measures with shared hosting, resulting in data theft leaving your website and its hosted data compromised.
- Server Location Besides several factors for displaying the relevant search results, search engines also evaluate the website location for deciding their rankings. If the user is based in the US, then search engines usually tend to show websites that are based in the US higher on the search results. Search engines use several indicators for determining the location of your website. One such important indicator is the IP address of your website. The website’s IP address is designated based on the area where your web hosting server is present. Such ‘local’ websites might be ranked higher when searching from localized territory and may have lower rankings at different locations. To ensure that your website ranks higher at all places, select a web hosting provider with its servers in multiple countries.
Concluding Remarks:
A reputed and well-recognized hosting provider can have a direct and significant impact on website SEO. A hosting provider with maximum uptime, faster page loading, and multiple servers is a great boon for any website owner. All these factors contribute to enhanced website rankings and digital presence.
Are you still looking for a trusted web hosting provider? Contact Team bodHOST today for an enhanced web hosting experience.