In today’s world, website speed is everything. Customers will certainly abandon pages or shopping carts if a website is slow to respond. Therefore, fast and reliable website hosting is integral to every business’ customers. However, does website hosting affect SEO?
What is website hosting?
Website hosting makes it possible for businesses to have a presence on the Internet. Hosting takes place on a server, which anyone can access and therefore see the website and its pages.
The server is essentially a storage facility. A business can keep its website on here and deliver pages to any visitor. Without hosting, a website cannot live on the Internet and thus it’s imperative that every business has it.
Does website hosting affect SEO?
The answer is most definitely, yes. Website hosting affects SEO in three ways – speed, uptime and location.
Website speed
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, understand that speed matters heavily in user experience.
Waiting for content to appear or not being able to interact with a page creates frustration. SEO is therefore affected by being ranked lower in the corresponding search engine results.
Businesses need website hosting that is not only super quick to respond, but also paints the pages quickly.
Clean and optimised code, in association with fast website hosting, allows Google to crawl the website rapidly and consume less bandwidth. A positive experience is had and therefore the website will rank higher in search.
Plenty of tools exist to easily check website speed. Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrix and Pingdom all allow website hosting to be tested.
How does speed of website hosting affect SEO?
Quite simply, website hosting speed effects SEO. Furthermore, the subsequent drop in search result position will lose potential customers that won’t see the business come up.
However, speed equally has a knock-on influence on existing customers. Current clients may well leave the website due to a continued frustrating and slow experience.
In today’s impatient world, 50% of customers will leave a page if it doesn’t load within three seconds. What’s more, every additional second of delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%.
Fast website hosting therefore not only affects SEO, but also bottom line profits as well.
How does uptime of website hosting affect SEO?
Uptime of website hosting is crucial. Nobody likes downtime. If a website is unavailable, it not only loses business, but search engines cannot crawl it to index the content.
Search engine crawlers will usually try and revisit a website they cannot access. However, if they are repeatedly hit during that day with downtime then they will move on.
Furthermore, increases in downtime frequency result in the website being flagged as unreliable and rankings therefore suffer.
Even a web host that guarantees 99% uptime will thus see about 7 hours of downtime a month. Cloud website hosting, where a website is replicated across several server locations to achieve 100% uptime, is what today’s serious business needs.
Uptime of website hosting therefore effects SEO. A fast, responsive website that is online can easily be accessed by crawlers. Consequently, the website will receive a search engine rankings boost.
Website hosting location affects SEO
Search engines also assess the location of website hosting when building their rankings.
Relevancy of search results for the user is the driving factor. Search engines will therefore normally display local results higher in their rankings.
The IP address of your website hosting is the key factor. A business may be located in one country, but if their website hosting is overseas; this can have a detrimental affect on search rankings.
Therefore, if a business is in the UK, it’s website hosting should also be located here for the SEO benefits that it brings.
What’s more, website hosting should also be located near to the target customer. Distance between customer and server should certainly be kept to a minimum.
The distance should be considered at the national level for businesses operating in just one country. On a global level, a content delivery network (CDN) should be used to deliver static assets from a server much closer to the customer.
Does website hosting affect SEO conclusion
Website hosting is often an afterthought following design and on-page SEO. However, it plays a vital role in the wider area of search engine optimisation.
Site speed is the biggest factor when it comes to website hosting. Search engines like fast loading websites, as do customers. However, uptime also plays a crucial role. The invention of cloud website hosting has certainly afforded more businesses increased uptime.
How the location of website hosting affects SEO also needs to be considered. The locality of the server being near your customer and in a jurisdiction that you know can’t be underestimated.