The Internet is the largest market in the world, and its growth is increasing day by day. Everything you need can be found on the Internet. If you own or operate a business, whether it is an online or physical store, you need to be present on the Internet to grow.
Thus, you need a website and further you need SEO done in your website to be in search engine results.
So if you want your business to succeed, you need a Search engine optimized website. This is making your website easy to see on search engine rankings, after all.
However, there are a lot of factors that affect the SEO rankings of a website. Sure, you have poor SEO practices to blame, but even a website that uses relatively good SEO practices can have a bad search engine ranking score.
Because the algorithms are constantly changing, the factors that affect SEO rarely stay the same. All we can be assured of is that to have a good SEO, your website must be fast, have adequate internal and external links, with optimized contents that are referred to by others.
Taking these things into consideration, do you want to know one more factor that affects the SEO of your website? It’s web hosting!
What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting or website hosting is simply letting a website run on a server. This process, of course, includes activities like housing, serving, and maintaining files for the website that a server is hosting.
How Web Hosting Affects SEO?
Does web hosting affect the SEO of a website? The simple answer to this is yes it does due to its speed, hosting limitation, and location. However, things are a bit more complicated than just these three words. That’s why you need to think before choosing web hosting providers.
Below are some of the factors that your web hosting can impact SEO.
Page Speed
A website that is hosted on a bad host is destined to become a disaster and all the aforementioned reasons are enough to make the statement a bitter truth.
If your website is hosted on a shared host, pick a better hosting option or else be prepared for poor SEO rankings, sudden website crash, downtime, and greater load time.
To experience what a good hosting for SEO offers, try Cloudways, which is a managed cloud hosting platform. It optimizes your website with decreased load time, 99.9% uptime ,and better SEO rankings as your website is likely to be online throughout the year.
The relation between web hosting, speed, and SEO of a website is rather straightforward. Each web hosting has a bandwidth limit and, depending on the website, it may sometimes need more bandwidth to function properly.
If the web host doesn’t meet the required bandwidth of a website, then the website will naturally run slow. Besides this, a web host may also be overloaded as well because of high traffic.
Should these things happen, a website will perform slowly. Those involved in SEO naturally know that speed is a major contributing factor to a good SEO. A speedy website will perform better and will keep better viewership. This leads to a good SEO for a website.
Whenever you choose a web host, consider your traffic, storage, and resource requirements.
If you want a website with fast speed, then VPS or dedicated servers are your best opinions. Besides this, a web host should offer CDN (Content Delivery Network) as well. This will minimize delays in loading web page content.
Server Uptime and Downtime
Server uptime is the period when a web host or web server runs without shutting down or restarting. On the flip side, server downtime is the period when the server is not in operation.
Depending on the uptime and downtime of a web host, the SEO ranking can change drastically. If the server-up time is short, then it is natural for people to not use the website that is hosted on such a server since they won’t be able to access the information there. The same can be said for websites hosted on servers with long downtimes.
Even if people do click on the link, they are likely to click off quickly instead of waiting for the server to restart. This inevitably increases the bounce rate for a website, which negatively affects the SEO ranking of a website.
Security
A web host is more than just a place that lets a website run – it is in charge of web security as well. Although the security services provided by a web host don’t directly affect the SEO of a website, the effect can be felt.
Let’s put it this way; a secure website runs at an optimum speed since it doesn’t have unnecessary things to load. This means increased speed, which ultimately means better SEO for your website.
Without adequate security, you get slower updates, your vulnerabilities get exposed and hackers can easily add their script – this slows down the website. In this aspect, SEO isn’t even the priority of having a secure website – it’s malware protection and data security. SEO is just something that is affected by the slowness caused by hacker scripts. Regardless of this, security is an important factor that affects the SEO of a website.
Server Location
The effect of Server Location on SEO is extremely simple.
The further the web host is from your primary site viewers, the slower your website will load, which results in negative points for SEO. Although the data travels extremely fast, it all depends on the medium. It may not matter on a smaller scale or smaller web pages, but even a single microsecond of delay in processing data per bit can cause an inconveniently slow websites – especially if they are big.
To solve this issue, you can use CDN. It works something like this: Content owners pay CDN operators to deliver their content and it would pay the IPS (Internet Service Provider) for hosting its servers for the Content creators. For those who are confused about what a CDN is, it is a group of servers that distribute web content.
Shared Hosting
As the name implies, shared hosting is an arrangement where multiple websites use the same server. The thing you need to know is that shared hosting does not have a negative or positive impact on SEO. The impact occurs when shared hosting causes performance issues and system crashes on the server.
Since a single server handles multiple websites, these issues are rather common. And, as we mentioned before, system crashes and performance issues are bad for SEO.
Besides this, because multiple websites are hosted by the same server, the Bandwidth RAM is shared among different websites as well. This can easily decrease the speed of a website, which can lead to negative SEO of your website.
Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer
Secure Socket Layer and Transport Layer Security are forms of encryption-based security used in authenticating and sending your data over the internet. Both SSL and TLS are similar in design and in function, with TLS being a slightly upgraded version of the SSL.
Now, although it is not a requirement for your website to be hosted on a server that provides these securities, the google algorithm boosts the websites hosted on a server with these security measures. Along with the SEO boost, you will get an additional security bonus as well.
You can choose either a free or paid version depending on your expected traffic, data security, and hosting needs. But, as with all the services that give you both paid and free versions, the paid one is better than the free version of SSL and TLS.
Conclusion
So, does web hosting affect SEO? Absolutely yes! Although the primary way for a web host or a web server to affect SEO is still speed and security, the factors mentioned here all have their way of affecting the SEO of your website in a slightly different but significant way.
Thus, make sure you choose the best cloud hosting provider in Nepal. If you are looking for a web host that meets all your requirements, then Prabhu host is one the best web hosting providers in Nepal that you can rely on. Our Web Hosting services ensure you with an SEO-friendly website that is fast and responsive.