Your choice of web hosting can have a surprisingly big impact on a bunch of different elements of your website—speed, uptime, and overall user experience being the most important ones. These things can chase away visitors before they become customers, so let’s do a bit of a dive into how web hosting affects your SEO so you can get around it.
Understand how SEO works, follow these tips, and you should be able to give your site a noticeable boost. Get this right, and you can expect to see not just more visitors, but more conversions (more customers).
Why Is SEO Important?
More Visibility
Good SEO makes you visible when someone uses a search engine (like Google) to look for information. If they’re searching for something that your website provides, your page will come up—IF it’s properly SEO’d. And considering most people never even end up clicking over to the second page of Google results, you really want to to be on page one if possible.
In a nutshell, good SEO leads to more clicks through to your website. And more clicks means more sales in the end (as long as you’ve got a good offer). So SEOing your site isn’t just a fancy trick—it’s a legitimate strategy to bring in more organic traffic and ultimately, more revenue.
A Better User Experience
SEO helps Google and other search engines to rank your content properly, but it’s not just about algorithms. It’s also about giving your visitors a better experience when they land on your website.
Things like using clear headings, good keywords, and putting out decent, informative content can make your site rank higher. Google (and your readers) should see it as providing something valuable, whether it’s information or products.
But there’s more to it than just content. If you optimize your website for things like loading fast, looking good on mobile devices, and being simple to navigate, it ALSO has a good effect on SEO.
When your visitor finds the experience of being on your website easy and intuitive, they’re more likely to browse around, and maybe even buy.
How Web Hosting Affects Your SEO
Site Speed and Load Times
Search engines like websites that load quickly, because it knows they make readers happy. If your page loading speed is low, you’d better be ready for high bounce rates, because people won’t stick around and wait. They’d rather bounce off to another site that gives them the info they need.
High bounce rates = worse SEO rankings. And your web host actually plays a role in your website loading fast or slow. Upgrading to a premium host and a dedicated server for your website (no sharing resources) can boost your loading speed by a whole lot more than you realize.
Some food for thought—websites that load within one second have, on average, a conversion rate three times higher than websites that take 3 to 5 seconds to load. Speed up your site, make more sales.
Server Uptime and Downtime
Uptime means your site is available. Downtime means it’s not. And if people can’t get onto your site, there’s no hope of making sales. Plus, if someone tries to visit your site once and it’s down, they’re more likely to not even try getting back onto your website.
As for Google, if it tries to crawl your site while it’s down, it’s going to have a shockingly bad effect on your SEO. So it’s in your best interest to pick a web host that’s going to keep your website up and running just about always.
Most top-tier hosts offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee at a minimum. But to be honest, that’s not really good enough if you want to really nail your SEO and grow your biz. We recommend choosing one with the gold standard of “four nines” at the very least.
Server Location and Performance
Did you know that where your server lives can make your site slower or faster? If your audience lives in a specific place, choosing a server that lives there too (or very close) will help it load faster and make it a happier experience for visitors.
But what about if your audience lives… Everywhere? A content delivery network (CDN) is your best bet. It’s a series of servers across the globe, each of which stores vital info from your site on the server so it doesn’t have to pull it from your main server, so it loads up a whole lot quicker for users near that server.
Tips to Optimize Your Hosting for Better Rankings
Server-Side Optimizations
You can’t exactly control the host’s server, but you can be picky when choosing a host. Pick one with solid-state dives (SSDs) instead of regular HDDs, because they’re MUCH faster and more stable.
Also, make sure the host’s server uses HTTP/2. This allows for multiple requests at the same time, which makes things a lot speedier when you’ve got high traffic levels. A CDN also speeds things up a bunch, so choose a host that offers one.
Website Optimizations
These you can do yourself. They might take some time, but trust us—they’ll make more of a difference than you think! Start by compressing images. You can run them through something like TinyPNG, which will make them smaller but keep their quality up.
Minifying your site’s code can also make a huge difference. If you’re savvy, you can do it yourself—otherwise it’s a really good idea to ask a coder to help you with it.
Lazy loading is another smart strategy. It delays the loading of images and videos until the reader has actually scrolled down to where they are, so no digital energy is wasted.
Browser caching is a smart technique that stores special files on the user’s device so if they come back to your site for a second time, it loads a lot faster because it doesn’t have to connect to the main server again.
Monitoring and Maintenance
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are great tools, and they’re free! Keep an eye on them to track how your site is performing. You can set up easy notifications that ping you if your site goes down or slows down, so you can quickly fix issues and bring it back up to speed.
Although it’s a little time-consuming, it’s an excellent idea to check the backend often and make sure your site doesn’t have broken links, make sure your plugins are all up to date, and your data is backed up.
Choose the Right Hosting Plan
Shared hosting might be cheap, but it’s not good enough, in most cases. A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a better choice, but a dedicated server is the best option because you won’t have to share resources with anyone else.
If you’ve got a WordPress site, think seriously about getting managed WordPress hosting. A lot of the backend stuff will be optimized for you, which can take some stress off your plate. Don’t forget to look for the four nines 99.99% uptime guarantee.
Lastly, make sure it’s scalable so that you can stick with the same hosting provider as your business grows. Even if you aren’t planning on growing soon, look ahead—growth is inevitable if you’re implementing these tips!
Conclusion
There are two parts to optimizing your SEO—choosing a web host that’ll work with you, and taking steps to tweak things in the backend. The good news is that implementing most of these things is a once-off thing that can make a huge difference. Only some things need to be done regularly, but it’s really worth doing.
A fast, reliable, and secure site makes visitors happy, but it also makes Google (and others) happy. You’ll rank better, gain more traffic, make more sales, and ultimately, have more success with these tips.
About the Author
Paul Wheeler runs a web design agency that helps small businesses optimize their websites for business success. He aims to educate business owners on all things website-related, at his own website, Reviews for Website Hosting.
