Importance of Web Hosting on Search Engine Ranking of Website

Significance of web hosting in terms of Search Engine Optimization has been always overlooked. In fact, web hosting was seldom mentioned in relation with SEO practices.

Major search engine attach great significance to user experience as one of the vital SEO factors. Page load speed is an important contributory factor for a better browsing experience. Network uptime, availability of bandwidth, and server performance are also important components that can boost website performance to a great extent.

It is obvious that frequent downtime events and reduced page load speeds are responsible for site abandonment by visitors. This can certainly impact your overall rankings due to negative user experience. This underlines the essence of uptime for maintaining uninterrupted website availability. This brings us to evaluate different factors that are found to impact Search Engine Optimization.

Importance of website speed

Website speed has been a hot topic of discussion lately. Speed is responsible to instantly load the website pages in response to requests from the visitors. This factor is accorded higher importance by leading search engines. The website traffic is directly proportional to its speed. The reason for this is the modern day internet users are using smart phones or Wi-Fi connections to access internet. These connections differ in terms of performance and therefore a faster loading website has better chances to attract and sustain visitors than a slow performing site.

In order to find a reliable webhost that can boost your website speed it is recommended to get associated with a reputed and established host that is ready to offer SLA backed guarantee of 99.99 percent uptime and nothing less than that. If you are confronted with slow site loading issue then it is time to check your server and the presence of bad coding, multiple images, HTML, CSS, and so forth. Any image that is larger than 100kb deserves to be optimized by using compression software.

Slow loading sites can be harmful to user experience. You can access a good analytics tool to check speed of your site and speed of page loading. In order to have a sound backing of your web host for a greater assurance of website speed, you can select webhosts that have earned robust reputation of offering remarkable speed to the hosted websites.

Having chosen a right host, you also need to check different hosting options. Among the conventionally available alternatives, one isadvised to try VPS hosting for availing dedicated resources. In shared hosting your website is vulnerable to resource consumption by even a single neighbor. However, in VPS environment you are assured of specified resources even if a neighbor is consuming large resources.

Website availability

Repeated downtime events can also affect search engine rankings because if the search engine spiders are not able to access your site more frequently, then the there will be negative consequences in terms of ranking. It should be appreciated that search engines are also concerned with their reputation and would not rank a site that is found to be frequently inaccessible.  

Whenever there is a talk of uptime, you will find almost all web hosting providers claiming upwards of 99 percent uptime. On needs to understand that high uptime is the result of high performance servers and constant monitoring of performance factors. Reputable hosts not only assure a sound uptime close to hundred percent but also undertake to compensate site owners in the event of an unexpected event.

Downtime can also be the consequence of a server crash. There are several causes of server crash including overloading on account of high traffic or lack of proper maintenance. Presence of viruses or malware can also result in server crash. Servers can go down occasionally. It is the ability of host to bring it back to life that should matter.

Type of hosting and SEO

It is very common for the new websites to choose shared hosting as the entry level hosting due to its affordability and convenience. Every website has to share vital resources including bandwidth and storage among hundreds of other neighbors.

It is frequently argued that noisy neighbors can adversely impact your websites search engine ranking or overall reputation. There are conflicting arguments about role of shared hosting on search engine ranking of a website. According to highly reliable information, the page ranking has nothing to do with the type of hosting.

It is therefore better to be on a safer side by choosing a reliable and reputed host. Since there is a plethora of hosting companies, you are bound to come across all types of providers. You need to exercise extreme care and precaution before choosing the right hosting company. Going through reviews, getting information from other website owners that are using the same hosting service, and checking for the presence of top tiered data centers are some of the steps you can initiate for narrowing down to the right host.