A good web host is the foundation of a strong website. Your web host provides the stability and support that your site needs to stay up and running smoothly. It also affects your site’s speed and uptime, which are two important factors in SEO.
If your web host is unreliable, your site will suffer from frequent downtimes and slow loading speeds. This will frustrate your visitors and hurt your ranking in search results.
So, why is using a good web host critical for SEO? Well, keep reading to find out!
Speed
Site speed is one of the most important SEO ranking factors. If your site is slow, it will not only rank lower in search results but will also frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates. A good web host will ensure that your site loads quickly and efficiently.
Look – visitors for an average of three seconds for a page to load before leaving. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, you’re likely losing visitors to your competitors.
A good web host will have server response times of 200ms or less. This means that when a user visits your site, the server will respond to their request within 200 milliseconds.
There are a number of tools you can use to test your site’s speed, including Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. These tools will help you identify areas where your site needs improvement so you can make the necessary changes.
Uptime / Downtime
Another reason why a good web host is important is uptime.
Uptime refers to the amount of time that a server, such as a web hosting server, is up and running.
A website with a lot of downtimes will rank lower in search engine results because it is not accessible to users and search engine crawlers. This leads to a lower search engine ranking, which in turn leads to less traffic.
A good web host will have a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Many small or cheap web hosts have terrible uptime. In contrast, reliable web hosts leverage top performing IT infrastructures like those from Microsoft Azure or Amazon’s AWS. You can even host a WordPress website on AWS and benefit from enterprise hosting performance. This means that your website will be up and running almost all of the time. Ultimately, this leads to more traffic and a higher search engine ranking.
Security
The security of your website is one of the ranking factors that Google takes into consideration when determining your website’s search engine ranking.
A website that is not secure is more likely to be hacked. When a website is hacked, hackers can insert malicious code into your website. This code can redirect your website’s visitors to other websites, steal their personal information, or even infect their computers with viruses.
All of this can lead to a decrease in traffic and a lower search engine ranking. A good web host will have security measures in place to protect your website from cybersecurity threats. These measures can include SSL certificates, firewalls, malware scanning, and intrusion detection.
Location
Google and other search engine spiders grab several location-based signals when they are crawling and indexing websites.
Some of these signals include the IP address of the server that is hosting your website, the location of your website’s visitors, and your website’s content.
If you want to rank higher in search engine results pages for local searches, then it is important to choose a web host that is located in the same country as your target audience.
For example, if you are targeting audiences in the United States, then you should choose a web host that is located in the United States. If you operate across the globe, consider a Content Delivery Network that has points of presence in multiple countries.
Backups
A good web host will create backups automatically and store them off-site so that they are not lost if something happens to the server that is hosting your website. These backups can be used to restore your site if it is ever hacked, the server crashes, or if you accidentally delete something.
Backups are important for SEO because they can help you avoid losing ranking data, website content, and traffic if something goes wrong with your website.
HTTPS / SSL Support
HTTPS is a security protocol that encrypts data between your site and the user’s browser. This helps protect sensitive information, such as credit card numbers and passwords, from being intercepted by malicious actors.
Google has stated that SSL encryption is a ranking factor. In fact, users get warned whenever they visit unencrypted sites. This warning can deter visitors from accessing your site, which will hurt your ranking in search results.
Make sure that your web host offers SSL/TLS encryption and has an easy way for you to install it on your site. This will not only protect your site from unseen calamities but is a ranking factor that can complement your SEO strategy.
Final Thoughts
There is no doubt that using a good web host is critical for SEO. A good web host can help you achieve and maintain a high search engine ranking by providing features such as uptime, security, location, and backups.
Make sure you also engage in other white hat SEO practices to further improve your website’s ranking. These include creating high-quality content, building backlinks, and optimizing your website for mobile devices.