Optimizing websites for search engines is more than ever a major digital challenge today. Do you have the article on tools to train in SEO? Now, let’s see in detail how the choice of a host can impact your SEO.
Website owners tend to focus on on-page and off-page SEO techniques first, sometimes ignoring the importance that a web host has for their website. While it is certainly true that good web hosting does not directly improve your ranking in search engines, a poor web host can, however, penalize your website. Imagine what will happen if a visitor gets a server error while visiting your page or the page timeouts? Obviously, without thinking, it will move to another website among the many other resources available on Google.
You will make a potentially costly mistake if you think that hosting your website and its search engine optimization are two different things. It is crucial to choose the best host, for this you will find more information on trusted services here. To a certain extent, your choice of hosting will affect the success of your SEO.
Most webmasters, especially those on a budget or just starting out, are often looking for the cheapest web hosting for their website. Some of them even opt for free hosting. Yet going for really cheap or free hosting is never a wise decision if you want your website to be successful.
Impact of website loading speed on SEO
In addition to having relevant and useful content, your website must also have an optimal loading speed. How fast? Simply fast enough so that your visitor does not lose patience!
A good web host will quickly load the elements of your website, whether they are your images, videos or other technical elements such as scripts.
Customers don’t like to wait. In return, your website will receive a good response from users and will improve its ranking in Google if it loads quickly. This applies to both computer and mobile searches. A slow website is sending the wrong signal to Google, which will quickly change your positioning.
Anyone who arrives at a site that is too slow is likely to leave it within seconds. In the SEO world, this is called the bounce rate, and this can affect your SEO.
A bad bounce rate (the percentage of total visitors who leave without interacting with the content or visiting another page) can quickly lead to penalties from search engines.
Dedicated or shared IP: interest in referencing
Although Google has not confirmed this, some SEO professionals claim that it can affect SEO.
When you rent shared hosting, you are using the same server and the same IP address shared with dozens of other websites, sometimes even hundreds. If some or most of these websites spam or are penalized, this IP will be associated with a bad reputation and this can affect your positioning.
Therefore, if you are hosted on the same server and the same IP address as other spamming sites, your legitimate website will also be affected. To avoid this, you should always choose a host that allows you to have a dedicated IP address or simply check what types of websites are hosted on the same IP address as you.
Web server caching
Simply put, server caching allows you to store a version of the most popular elements of your website content for faster retrieval.
This saves your server from having to assemble data from scratch every time. The benefit of caching depends on the complexity and popularity of the pages.
Large hosts that really care about server speed have their own caching systems that make sure you don’t have to worry about it.
Scalability for peak loads
The more your website is visited, the more scalability problems can arise. You don’t want the loading speed of your website to slow down once you start getting more search traffic or going viral. The more the server handles the additional traffic, the more it is said to be scalable or scalable.
Another important issue is the authorized traffic, i.e. the number of visitors who can access our website per month. Most web hosts provide 1 to 3 gigabytes, and some of them offer unlimited traffic.
For a small project or a project that starts, it is usually enough to have a few gigabytes of monthly traffic. You will have time to sign up for larger projects as your website grows.
Server geographic location for SEO
The location of the server is a fairly important factor when considering hosting a website. The reliability and rapid accessibility of a website depend on the geographic location of the server provided by the provider. As long as the data centre is located near the majority of visitors to your website, the loading time will be quick; otherwise, it can cause unnecessary delays while loading your site.
The location of the server or IP address is also important for SEO as Google’s algorithms examine IP addresses to take into account the country of the server. Always choose a host located near your country, otherwise, it may affect your SEO.
Stability and availability
Just as a slow-loading page is a bad experience for search engines, clicking on a link and finding out that the website is down is a bad experience.
Any good web server generally offers a guarantee of availability or online time (Uptime). The higher this figure, the less risk your site will take for its SEO.
Remember that each additional decimal place is useful. For example, a 99% uptime means that your website may be down and therefore unavailable for just over 7 hours per month, while a 99.9% uptime means it will potentially be unavailable less than an hour per month.
SSL certificate: an issue for positioning?
According to Google, having an SSL certificate (HTTPS) is not a classification factor and this has been confirmed by Google. However, a simple request on Google makes it possible to realize that often the first results are in https.
Most quality web hosting and domain name providers offer a free SSL certificate. Do not deprive yourself of it and make sure to choose your provider in this sense.
Besides the fact that HTTPS may be a ranking factor, you will also gain confidence thanks to the padlock icon next to the URL in the browser. In addition, SSL is a necessity today if you use systems on your site that use identifiers and passwords for users.
In conclusion, we can, therefore, say that a website host has an important role to play in the SEO optimization of your site. Although no host can claim to be the best in SEO, be sure to choose a reliable and respectable provider, you can protect your website from some unpleasant technical surprises that could annoy your visitors and that also affect SEO such as slow loading, availability or even security risks.
About the author
DMTwebhosting.com’s Editorial Team prides itself on bringing you the latest web hosting news and the best web hosting articles!
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