Any company hoping to raise its presence in the World Wide Web must abide by the rules of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With Google owning about 92 percent of the search market, a higher ranking in SERPs will improve searchability, visibility, and credibility for a brand.
To harness the benefits of SEO, companies must first ensure that their websites are fully functional with a reliable web host. Without careful consideration, choosing the wrong hosting provider may do more harm than good.
Here are the reasons why choosing the right web host is important to SEO for your site:
Server uptime and downtime
Search engines focus a lot on website reliability, which largely depends on server uptime and downtime. This metric is necessary to maintain the quality of search results.
Downtime refers to the amount of time a website cannot be accessed due to server problems. If the site is constantly down when search engine bots try to crawl it, the site will be flagged as untrusted, thus lowering its ranking.
As such, choosing an excellent web host is essential. It ensures that your website has enough resources to be up and running at 99.9% of the time. If a site is experiencing downtime on a regular basis, this is a clear sign of changing hosting providers.
Loading speed
Since 2010, Google has highlighted the importance of page load speed when determining search rankings. Moreover, it clearly states that two seconds is the minimum for e-commerce sites.
Why? The faster the site, the better the user experience.
From a business point of view, a good page load speed will gain more in terms of sales and visibility. According to Amazon, a one-second slowdown in their page load can cost them $1.6 billion in sales annually! If a website is built with the goal of converting traffic into sales, this is a major factor that all website owners should invest in.
Although the page loading speed is not entirely dependent on the web host alone, having a reliable provider can support the website load time with the latest technology and infrastructure to handle a large volume of traffic. If the webpage takes more than two seconds to load, this is a clear sign that a web host evaluation is required.
server location
The location of the server is closely related to the speed of your site.
To reduce latency, it is recommended that you host your website in a data center located close to your visitors. The shorter the distance, the faster the data transmission.
For this reason, Google prefers to display results based on the user’s location. So if your visitors are primarily based in UK, choose a web host with a data center in UK. This way, you will have a higher chance of getting a good ranking.
Alternatively, if you are a global business, you can also choose a hosting company with a network of geographically distributed servers. So, wherever your customers are, your website will always be on top of Google SERPs.
How do you choose the right web host?
In addition to the key factors mentioned above, it is also important to ensure that the provider has excellent customer support, security features, and upgrade options.
For example, choose a web hosting that supports 24/7 customer support, so you can contact them any time there is a problem.
In terms of security, choose a web host that offers various security measures such as regular backups and updates, malware detection and removal, and DDoS protection.
Also, keep an eye on the company’s upgrade options, so you can seamlessly expand your resources whenever you need to.
