How Hosting Server Speed Affects SEO Ranking?
Though hosting may not be the most well-known element of SEO, it certainly is an important one. If you want your site to get recognised by Google, it needs to function well. The hosting company you choose can either help you with that or ruin your chances.
These are just some of the most common ways your hosting server can affect your website’s SEO performance.
Site Speed and Load Times
It takes a very short time for people to lose focus. In a matter of seconds their attention can easily wander off. That’s extremely important information when it comes to your website’s speed and load times.
Faster load times will increase a chance of a visitor staying on your page and purchasing an item or requesting services from you. A site that takes one second to load has up to three times higher conversion rates than a website that loads for five seconds. In addition to that, a study on mobile site data shows that even a change as small as 0.1 second load time can make a retail shopper spend up to 10% more in purchases.
In other words, if you ensure that your business site load quickly you will draw more customers in and make more sales.
Server Downtime
The next factor that can also significantly affect your SEO efforts is server downtime. That’s the last thing anyone would want to happen to their website.
Server downtime will end up costing you a lot of money. With missed potential sales while your site is down, your reputation will also go down and a number of customers will choose to not come back for another purchase. If an online user opens your website and sees it’s not working, they will simply assume that your website is not reliable enough.
It can get even worse than that. As a whole, server downtime will affect your SEO efforts and decrease your chances of getting a high ranking. If a search engine happens to crawl your page while it’s down, you can get de-indexed for a certain period of time. What’s even worse is that Google tends to crawl a website less regularly if it catches it during the server downtime. That certainly isn’t good for your SEO efforts.
To avoid this issue, find a host with an uptime guarantee that will make sure the server downtime is a very rare problem on your site.
Location
The location of your company’s servers is also very important. The ones located near most of your target audience will have better site speeds. This is obviously great for your SEO. The location can also have effect on your data storage regulations that you have to comply with. In the case of noncompliance, you might have to face forced downtime, and nobody wants that.
Additionally, if you’re a local business focusing on the target audience in your vicinity, seeking local SEO management to lead you through this process can also be very helpful.
Your domain name is also tightly related to the location-based factor. According to Google, all generic domain extensions are equal when it comes to SEO. This quite literally means that you could use .pizza instead of .com and it would be totally fine if it works for your business.
Country extensions are for a different conversation since they’re using a different domain.
Type of Hosting
Once you start looking for hosting companies you need to look into different types of hosting as well. They can significantly affect the way a hosting server will either make or break your SEO efforts.
There are several types of hosting available. These are just some of the most common ones you will run into:
- Free: great for personal website, but not very adequate for SEO
- Shared: works great for small websites and business since they are affordable and beginner-friendly
- Virtual Private Server (VPS): you’ll have to share a physical server with other websites, but you will have a separate virtual partition all for yourself
- Dedicated: just like the name suggested, this is a server type that is dedicated to you fully
- Cloud hosting: allows your website to spread across various different remote servers
Bounce Rate
Another important factor that can make an impact on your SEO is bounce rate. This is essentially the percentage of visitors who visit one page only and don’t take any further actions on your website. Just like the name may suggest, these are the visitors who bounce before making a purchase or doing anything on your site.
Now, whether this factor really affects SEO is a topic of debate and controversy. While Google has officially denied that bounce rate can affect SEO ranking, some other sources showed a correlation between these two.
So, though it’s not an official factor for SEO ranking, it can clearly still affect your website. It’s an indicator of low dwell time and at the end of the day that’s something that Google looks into when it comes to ranking factors. In short, if a lot of people just leave your website without making any actions and go back to Google instead, it gives off an impression that your users don’t find your content relevant, helpful, and of quality. Google automatically makes a note of that since the primary goal of Google is to select high-quality content that is relevant and useful to online users.
In the end, improving your bounce rate and dwell time can actually help you boost your SEO efforts even though there’s no direct link between these two. How your customers and new users interact with your content is still very important.
Security
Lastly, Google makes sure to never send its users to sites that seem risky. With a reliable hosting server your site will be recognised as a trustworthy source and you will instantly have higher chances of getting great ranking on search engines.
For instance, back in 2014 it was announced that one of the best ranking signals was valid HTTPS since they allow users’ browser or web app to securely connect to the website. This still stands to this very day.
Conclusion
Overall, the server hosting you choose can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts and rankings. The above-listed ones are just some of the most common ways that you need to keep an eye out on.
