Building a website may be a challenging task for novice digital practitioners. It is challenging for them to decide what to prioritize in their website design and content to attract the readers’ attention. Also, the location of your website hosting, and their infrastructure (can) have a bigger impact on your SERP rankings.
Both quality and design are essential for the website to rank, but certain other decisive factors help the website rank in Google’s top search results.
A website host can be defined as a service that ensures the website is shown in the search results.
A server stores all the data on the website and displays it in the search results of all the devices having an internet connection. The hosting defines the speed of the page loading.
A fast, reliable, and secure hosting means increases traffic to the site. In the same way, slow and unreliable hosting can harm the usability and de-rank your website.
How does web hosting work?
When you visit a website, the search request will be sent from your device to the web server where your website is hosted via the internet.
Server respond to request and search for the relevant data to show on the user’s computer. User use the internet to connect with the web server and bring you the required information.
It depends on the server’s response rate and how fast it brings the required results. The server type should be selected following the traffic user have on their site.
Why good web hosting is Important for SEO?
Hosting is good for SEO because of the following reasons.
1. Speed
All internet users agree that they require high speed for their search results to show and guide them accordingly. The best time period for a site to load is 2 seconds.
But this is quite hard to achieve; therefore, you should try to make the load speed of your website as fast as you can. You can use Google’s most recent algorithm update about speed to optimize your website better.
It is hard for a slow website to come in the top search results because neither users nor google can benefit from such websites.
2. Uptime and Downtime
Google is an answering machine. When people search for something on Google, it crawls over the websites, organizes the web contents, and then shows the best results to the user.
But sometimes, it happens that the website is down or slow. In that case, Google will not be able to crawl your website and its content, and it will not be shown to the users.
If it frequently remains down, Google will lose trust in such a website and will not send users to your website. This may be temporary at the start, but if it continues to load slowly or stay down frequently, it will permanently damage the ranking of your website.
The availability of your website on Google can be easily checked using Google Search Console.
3. Security
A secure website has a positive impact on SEO. Regular maintenance is required to make the website secure.
Suppose user compromise the security of their site. In that case, it becomes vulnerable to hackers’ attacks, and they can use user traffic for posting immoral content related to pornography, gambling, and drugs.
Furthermore, Google imposes security standards like HTTPS and penalties for inappropriate content. While choosing hosting for your website, go for those who provide proper and timely maintenance and tell you about the outdated parts of the website and essential updates.
In this way, you will maintain the performance and security of your business or blogging website.
4. Location
The location of the hosting is crucial in SEO. When the search engine shows results, it takes several location-oriented signals such as; what is the user’s location? What is the site of the business?
And where is the website hosted? The latter is essential because it decides how far the data has to travel, ultimately affecting the speed of your website.
It is advised to use local hosting for your website. For example, if your business is in the USA, your website should be hosted in a USA data center.
If your company operates worldwide, then your website should be hosted in Content Delivery Network (CDN), which has data centers around the globe to serve the data locally. Thus, the hosting is fast no matter where the user is present.
If you compromise on the speed and buy hosting because it is economical, then the data will have to travel more and affect your website’s speed. This can have major effect on site SEO ranking.
Conclusion
Google wants to have high usability for its users and send them fast and reliable results. Users don’t wait for a slow website, and they instantly go back to search results if your website takes more time to load.
While hosting your website, two key factors should be kept in mind; it should be secure and located in the same region where your target audience is. Poor hosting will drastically impact your website’s SEO ranking.
Hosting alone cannot boost the ranking. You need to follow a proper and structured SEO process to make your website well ranked.
However, hosting is an essential requirement of SEO. It is the foundation on which strong SEO results are built.