As a website administrator or owner, every day is usually spent trying to improve your site’s performance. Every tweak, configuration, and update you make is intended to make sure the site’s performance is enhanced. Aside from that, you will also spend nights worrying about your site’s SEO ranking so people can actually find it.
One of the main factors that can affect your website’s SEO ranking is the hosting provider you choose to go with. This is why:
Good hosting is fast hosting
One of the key factors that will determine your website’s SEO ranking is the speed at which your pages load. A good web hosting provider will have excellent processing power and a bandwidth that allows for rapid access and serving of your web pages.
This is especially true due to the fact that the number of people who access the internet using mobile devices have surpassed those that do so using computers. Google, taking this trend into consideration, has made page speed a deciding factor in its SEO ranking algorithm.
If you want to beat the competition, you better start testing your page speeds today, and switch hosting providers should your results be sub par. Of course, you’d want to make sure the pages themselves aren’t causing the lag.
It also means stability
One trait that makes for a good web hosting provider is near 100% uptime. Your web hosting provider shouldn’t have an uptime percentage less than 99 percent.
The damage an unavailable hosting server could cause your website’s SEO ranking is multi-faceted:
- When people search for your website and Google can’t find it, the search engine won’t be too happy with you
- Bounce rates (or rather the absence of them) are the key to improving your SEO ranking. But, if your server and website are down, you will get a 100 percent bounce rate – that’s not good
- If your website is offline, it will leave a negative impression on your visitors and they might decide to never return – no traffic leads to bad SEO ranking
Therefore, you need to make sure your website is hosted on a hosting provider with a good reputation and good reviews from both consumers and monitoring bodies.
Good hosting providers are sticklers for security
The security of your user and visitors’ data should always be at the forefront of your website’s online existence. You need to make sure no personal or financial information is leaked or stolen from your databases – which are usually hosted by your hosting provider.
A good hosting provider will take its servers’ security seriously. It will make sure all its software and hardware have had all the necessary patches and updates done on time. It will also make sure the servers are protected with the latest versions of the best antivirus and anti-malware solutions.
Otherwise, the scenarios you can expect (and that could hit your SEO ranking are):
- Losing all your clients and visitors because you have lost their data
- Having to take your website down because you won’t be able to continue doing business (or even exist online) because of the lawsuits that follow
- Being flagged as a spam website because your website has been hacked or hijacked into sending out unsolicited emails
- Finding yourself on a server that you share with another website that has been hacked or hijacked and being flagged by search engines simply because you share the same IP address
As you can see, a web hosting provider that doesn’t take care of its servers and your website can actually lead to your website being blacklisted and even taken offline. That won’t ever be good for your SEO rankings.
An SSL certificate helps climb SEO ranks
Some web hosting providers have free SSL certificates on offer. They even have an automated installation process that lets you secure your website within a matter of minutes.
Websites that have URLs starting with “https://” instead of the more common “http://” have SSL certificates installed and are deemed to be much more secure. These certificates ensure that any data coming to, or leaving, a website is encrypted.
According to Google, this is one of the factors that contribute to a good SEO ranking, as secure websites are preferred over those that are not. Therefore, make sure your hosting provider allows for the installation of the certificates (preferably for free) instead of making you purchase and install them from a third-party service provider.
What should you do?
If you find your website stuck on a hosting provider that’s slacking in these areas, it could be time to move on. The sooner you make the move, the better for you, your business, and especially your clients and visitors.
