Are you searching for the best web hosting services? Wait, you must consider one key factor before you make a decision- and that is SEO. The question whether- “Can web hosting affect your search engine ranking?” must be lingering on many of the website owners.
If you too are in a state of dilemma, let us solve this puzzle for you. Yes, a bad web host can affect the SEO of your website. There are three major ways in which your SEO can get affected due to web hosting.
1. Website Speed
Your rankings can drop because your website takes long time to load. Search engines take this as an important consideration while ranking your site.
You can check the speed of the website using any available tools in the market like Pingdom or GTmetrix.
The code of the website may affect the page load speed of the website. What if you have fixed all the required metrics in the code and still the site loads like a snail’s speed? In this case, your web hosting provider is responsible for the pace of your website.
It is quite common that in a shared hosting plan your website is sharing resources with another website hosted on the same shared server. If your web host provider has hosted your site on a web server that consists of hundreds of other heavy sites, it will conclusively use higher resources, which will result in slow loading of websites. In this case, you can ask your web hosting provider to move your site to another server or you may change your web hosting plan or move to a dedicated server. This will improve the loading speed of your site.
2. Location
While deciding the position for the rankings, the search engine also considers the location of your website. That means if you search something, it will display results of those sites that are based in your region. The search engines track the IP addresses of the website to find out the location of the site and display relevant results.
The IP address depends on the location of your web server. For example: If your web hosting provider’s physical location is in the UK. There are higher chances of your site to appear in the search results by the relevant keyword searched by someone in the UK and so, your site may rank lower in other countries for the same keyword.
If you are planning to target a specific region for your website then you must choose a server that is located in the same region as the target audience location.
3. Security
Search engine favors websites that are trusted and secure. The added layer of security to your website builds trust among users as they know any information that is exchanged with the website is going to be secure.
It is quite obvious that SSL certificate offers security that ensures encryption of all the information shared. The website becomes trusted for the search engine once the SSL certificate is installed. The search engines have the ability to identify a secure website and HTTPS is used as a ranking signal. So, to take an additional advantage to rank your website in search engine one must install SSL certificate.
How to choose an SEO friendly web host?
There are wide ranges of hosting companies available. One must do a complete research before choosing the web host. You need to take into consideration all the factors mentioned above. To ensure your site doesn’t lack for rankings in search engines.
Additionally, there are some other factors too that need to be considered while choosing the web host and they are-reviews, price, experience (time a certain web host has been in the industry) etc.
There is no specific SEO web hosting provider as such, by choosing a web hosting provider that is reliable and offers good technical support, you can pick the best web hosting provider for your website.
