Does Web Hosting affect SEO of a website? I have come across this question so many times. It’s very common and if you have been wondering too, i highlight whatever you need to know in this article. Basing on my personal experience, i will explain to you exactly how web hosting affects SEO of a website and give you reasons why you should be cautious with the kind of web host you plan to host your website with. If you are disappointed or frustrated with your current host, no worries! You might have to check out the best web hosting providers that will give you value out of your money.
What you should know is Google tries so hard to display relevant websites on the first or so pages of it’s search results. So many factors make a website relevant to Google crawlers and some of which are; Domain Authority, Page Authority, Link Trust, Web Hosting, Responsiveness plus more. If your web server keeps timing out or experiences excessive downtime in a month then your search engine ranking positions are unlikely to improve but will rather keep dropping or worse the whole domain gets affected and none of your pages earn a first or second page slot for most search queries.
As a blogger, i believe you rely on traffic to keep a groove your blogging career. If you are spending hours writing blog posts and extremely few or no one reads them then you are doing nothing but wasting your time. This depends, some people blog for fun and some blog for a living. If you blog for a living then you require a certain amount of traffic to earn a living out of your blog implicating your SERPs shouldn’t be dropping but rather only improving. If you blog for fun then you might as well mind less about the inconsistency of your web host.
How exactly does Web Hosting Affect SEO of a Website?
Like said earlier on, i am going to explain this in various / possible occurrences and try to reflect whatever repercussion that may arise but before we head into that, i want to make it clear that if your server downtime is regular then you might have a hard time improving your SERPs. Lets look at some of the occurrences below.
Response Time: Apparently, if you have used WordPress for a long time then you should know what response time is and how relevant it is. To make this clear, server response time is the amount of time a web server takes before it responds to a request from a user’s browser. Fact is most of the websites that dominate the first positions of SERPs have exceptional response time implicating if your page has a high response then you might find it really hard to rank for certain keywords especially high competition keywords. Most people switch between servers lately because they want a web host whose server will still have great response time despite the number of active hits (users) on a website. If you want to test the efficiency of your web host on this, try sending 50 or more users on a website at the same time and be the last user to access it; if the site loads quickly then your web host might just be good for you. However, this depends on the web hosting plan you are signed up to, some plans can’t handle so may requests. Providers like SiteGround and InMotion Hosting have been proven to have exceptional response time for WordPress.
Uptime: Of the 7 days of a week, 30 days of a month or 365 days of a year, how many days or minutes is your website online? Most people tend to under-look this but believe me, if your server has regular downtime than uptime then your SERPs will keep dropping. Google bots try so hard to maintain relevant results on the first page for respective keywords and if your website is inaccessible most of the times (DNS errors or more) then you might lose your positions for a web page or have your entire site marked as not relevant. 98% of web hosting providers will guarantee you 100% uptime which is not possible! your website will definitely be off for some minutes in a month only that you might not notice it. The 100% uptime guarantee is nothing but a marketing strategy used by web hosting companies to attract more users to their respective servers. You should never fall prey of this. WP Engine, SiteGround & iPage all have great server uptime.
Server Resources: How much server resources has your web host allocated you? Your control panel might show unlimited but again it comes down to one thing, there’s no such thing as unlimited resources on a web server unless you are signed to a package that guarantees increase with expansion; That’s much fair. Over a year ago, i signed up to a host that limited IO processes and my website timed out often in the times of when my traffic shot up. Good thing is most reputable web hosting companies lately don’t over limit IO resources but rather may ask you to upgrade your web hosting package. Other ploys you should watch out for are unlimited disk space and data transfer! They are not real.
Tech Support Expertise: This is one of the most common ignored factors that count a lot towards the SEO of your website. Fact is, you will always encounter obstacles when hosting your website. This could stretch from broken sites, Malware, getting hacked and more but not every one has the capacity to deal with such issues personally. Some may hire experts to deal with their queries but truth is most web hosting companies will work on your issues free unless it’s out of their control. If your support isn’t efficient then your website might face so many damages before you resolve everything which is a very big issue. If you are running WordPress, i recommend you sign up for Managed WordPress Hosting so that you get assigned to WordPress experts for support in case anything goes wrong with your website. 3 years ago, my magazine site got broken when my hosting provider was trying to switch my website files between name servers using Backup Buddy; which left me with over 500 broken links, got my rankings dropped and made me accept that my 2 years efforts were finally wasted in a snap of a finger. Always mind the level of expertise a web host has before signing up with them. You can confirm this by reading their reviews from web hosting review sites.
I have encountered all the four scenarios above and i am sure some of you have encountered the same. Web hosting affects SEO of a website in so many ways but i have tried to list down the most common of those that have quite big impact on websites SEO especially if left untouched. Have you had any issues with your web host before? How did it impact? Did it impact negatively on your website’s SEO? share your experience with us below. You might also wat to check out the Best web hosting providers for WordPress.
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