5 Web Hosting Factors that Can Affect your SEO

Most of us are always on the lookout for effective tips and best practices on optimizing websites for search engines, but we should always be mindful of the physical factors that can be seen in our websites that can help in giving a positive impact in our websites.

Some of these physical factors are from web hosting, which really has a major impact on our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, either positive or negative.

Here are five factors from web hosting that can greatly affect your SEO exertions.

Table of Contents

1. Website Speed

A fast website speed will give you higher rankings in search engine results pages than slow ones. Today, a fast loading site is not enough to feature to put your site on the first page. You would need to pair it with a secure a stable offsite and onsite SEO to maximize your movement in the rankings. Here are some guides that can help you optimize your website speed to it’s fastest:

A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization – this guide has an easy to follow instructions that you can easily implement to your site.
Guide for Image Sizing – this guide helps you in getting the right dimensions and file extensions of your site’s images to contribute in your site’s speed.
Tips for Fast Loading HTML Pages – this guide is made by Mozilla to help you in hastening your loading speed by tweaking some of the technical side of the site.

Poor loading time for websites is an easy path for poor user experience because they will just look at a blank page without anything loading. It will lead to poor metrics for your website with a high bounce rate, and fast visitation for users. Basically, it will lead your rankings lower and lower every single day it happens.

2. Site Uptime

Uptime of your site is important especially if you are boosting your traffic and visibility. Every single time your site is offline, you are losing out on many things like new traffic, new visitors, and revenue and sales.

IHS conducted a study that sampled 400 mid to large companies. It showed that an average of five network downtimes was faced by businesses every month.

Some of the reasons are a loss of network devices, lack of monitoring time by developers and administrators, lack of power, poorly changed configurations, and DDoS attacks. You may choose to pick a stable web host that can offer a 100% uptime as much as possible to avoid downtime in your website.

3. Shared Hosting Issues

Considered as another important SEO factor is web hosting. If you don’t have the budget for dedicated hosting, you might be using a shared hosting for your site.

Shared hosting rarely becomes a problem but when it does, it can influence your site’s online presence negatively. Shared hosting services are made to share the space you have with other unknown websites. You would not know if these unknown websites can harm your site in various ways.

Avoiding this kind of service can help you dodge many possible spammy sites. To check, you can enter your URL in a reverse IP domain check to know who are co-existing with you on the same server.

4. SSL Certificate

Building trust with your audience is essential for establishing your business. You need to ensure their safety while they are on your website. In fact, your website is where you and your audience is building your relationship in.

You need to have a Secure Sockets Layer Certificate or SSL to establish your visitor’s safety and security on your website. These certificates protect the data that is being traded by the website and the user. Basically, it is a protective cover of all data that can be critical for any user.

SSL certificates would help you put to higher rankings in search engines. In 2014, Google included SSL certificates in the ranking factors in their criteria. This is to improve internet and user experience for everyone.

5. Geo-Proximity

Distance is still a big factor for loading time. If your audience is coming from a far location from your server, it can greatly affect the loading time. The nearer the user is from the server, the faster the web page will load.

A web host that is near for your target audience can improve speed and performance. But for multiple located businesses, you may use the cloud or content delivery networks (CDN). These modern cloud hosting can help you in configuring the servers that are not far from your audience, also it is extremely cheap so it would not be a problem for you.

There are several high-quality hosts you can find on the internet but you have to make sure that the one you pick is right for you. Do not just pick because of the host’s popularity; be diligent in doing your research about the hosts you are considering. Make sure it has the qualities you prioritize or else it might not be as effective as you hope it would.