Why Does Your Choice of Web Hosting Matter for Your Website's SEO?

Charlie Brown

March 09, 2018

	Not rated
	Rate:

A web hosting service allows you the use of their server to place your website on. Buying hosting is akin to purchasing land to build your house on. It enables your site to be accessible via the WWW (World Wide Web). However, to make the website visible in the top ranks of search engine results, you will have to focus on search engine optimization. We have heard a lot about these two concepts – web hosting and SEO. However, does one depend on the other in any way? Will your choice of hosting determine the quality of your site's SEO? Experts state that it will. Let us discuss some ways that hosting affects your website's performance and ranking.

Seamless presence

The kind of downtime (the period when the web host server is down, and your website becomes inaccessible) that you get from your web hosting service would play a significant role in your SEO. Search engines bots crawl all the pages of a site to determine its ranking based on its quality and relevance. Long hours of downtime will not only make your site inaccessible to the visitors and potential buyer, costing you valuable business, but it will also prevent search engine spiders from crawling it, which will severely affect its ranking.

If it happens more than once, the search engine may also label your site as 'unreliable.' Even a relatively small downtime every day can have a damaging impact on your site's visibility and credibility. That is why while selecting a web hosting service, you must go for one that guarantees at least 99.99% uptime.

Page load speed

Though many people still argue over whether the page load speed has an impact on a site's SEO, an expert from eterpro Birmingham AL did confirm to us that loading speeds are a critical factor that determines a site's ranking as per the Google algorithm. Even if you believe for a second that slow loading websites do not affect search engine ranking, you have to agree that a site that takes forever to load will undoubtedly put off visitors, which is never good news for a website even if it enjoys good SEO. The hosting has a significant role to play in determining how fast a site can load, which is why you need to select one carefully.

The server location

If a visitor from the US carries out a Google search, the search results will display the sites which are from the same location. So your choice of the web host and the package you will select from the service provider should depend on where you are offering your products or services. For example, if you own a flower delivery business that caters to specific towns and cities of the US, your website should feature in searches made by people from those locations. Therefore, it would be ideal to buy hosting from those locations.

Continuity is essential

When you change the structure of your website by moving to a different content management system and new hosting, search engines may look at the revamped site as a brand new one. That will be a waste of all the efforts you made in creating backlinks, writing good content, and improving the other SEO features of your website. That is why moving a site to a new web hosting service can sometimes bring more problems than benefits. If you are completely dissatisfied with your present web host and find it imperative to change, then you must check with the new web host what their transition plan is for a successful migration.

Security

As we move into 2018, we see more and more emphasis being placed on data security and confidentiality. The vast amounts of public and private data being recorded on websites make them an attractive target for cybercriminals who find out newer ways to hack into a site and steal the different types of data or corrupt the same to cause damage to the site or its reputation. That, in turn, can also affect the SEO rankings of the website. That is why you must consider both the quantity and the quality of security features offered by the hosting provider.

Business owners spend much time perfecting their website through content development, backlink building, and overall search engine optimization so that it can rank high in the search engine results page and attract the potential customers. However, they often ignore or underestimate the importance of a good web hosting service, which can do its own bit to improve search engine rankings. Ignoring such a crucial aspect can make all your other efforts go in vain.