Choosing a good web hosting company is one of the biggest challenges for website owners. The impact of poor and good hosting on the ranking and website optimization is very large. A secure and accessible website is one of the most important SEO factors that largely depends on your hosting company. Without good SEO, people won’t be able to find your website when searching on Google. Nowadays, search engines rank speedy sites with good user experience which is the essence of quality hosting.
Relation Between SEO and Hosting
Hosting can be one of the reasons why your website optimization won’t be successful, so you need to pay adequate attention to it. The platform on which your website is hosted isn’t very important for SEO and Google, but there are some web hosting factors that will certainly affect the ranking and therefore your website traffic. These are the type of hosting, server location, downtime/uptime, and page loading speed of a website.
1. Yes or No to Shared Hosting?
Why should you say no to shared hosting if you want your website to be ranked high in Google? The answer lies in the fact that (unofficially) Google doesn’t prefer websites that are hosted on a shared server, which most users see a good solution due to its affordable price. Google is aware that not all sites can afford nor want to be on dedicated servers.
Per se, shared web hosting isn’t bad for the authority of your website in Google search ranking and it doesn’t affect SEO. For example, shared hosting can be quite an outstanding solution for your website to easily kick start your website. They also have fast and reliable performance, quality and unlimited storage space. However, the problem is when there are hundreds of thousands of spammy websites on the
same IP address that overwhelms the minority of normal websites. This is when shared hosting negatively affects the website’s ranking.
2. Server Location
Not only the type of hosting influences ranking but also the location of the server. Having a server location close to the target audience leads to the faster redirection of the audience to your website. It’s more likely that you’ll fetch good SEO ranking and relevant traffic this way. That’s because IP address is directly related to the geographical location of your website and Google prefers to link a user from one country with a website from the same country.
The native location of the server means relevant website traffic, so IP address has an important role in placing your website in the frontline of Google search results. We strongly recommend hosting your site on the same region or country when you offer local business or services and target regional audience. Also, server location impacts web page load time. Closer the server location is to the audience; the faster data fetching and download speed is. This helps your target audience to view the page faster and hence increases the possibilities of getting higher rank on local Google search results.
Most companies like SiteGround offer a small fee to transfer your files from one server to another server which means you can choose one of the physical locations offered by them.
3. Downtime and Uptime
Downtime indicates the amount of time your website is unavailable due to server problems. If your visitors often come across blank pages or have to wait longer than expected, they will turn to your competition. In addition, search engines like Google are smart enough to capture the downtime and show relevant errors in Google Search Console (like 500 – server error). This will lead to people and search engines mark your website as unreliable, which will affect SEO and ranking.
Google doesn’t want to rank unreliable websites high in its results because it also reflects badly on its reputation. Ideally, you want your website to be available 100% of the time. However, downtime is inevitable, even with the most expensive and high-quality hosting packages. So, you shouldn’t accept anything that guarantees less than 99.9% availability.
The best way to avoid downtime due to unexpected traffic spike is to auto scale CPU and RAM dynamically whenever needed. This option is available with most of the Cloud hosting services for a nominal fee and you can reduce the resources when the traffic is back to normal.
4. Page Load Speed
Google was pushing site owners to pass Core Web Vitals as if page loading speed is one of the important factors in the ranking. However, it’s just one of over 200 factors, and as such, it will affect only about 0.5% of your ranking. Nevertheless, it’s always worth paying attention from good user experience perspective.
It is worth to note that slower page loading isn’t always necessarily the fault of your web host provider. The configuration and coding of your website could be a cause of the slowdown. If you’re sure that your site’s technical setup is optimized and you still have loading speed issues, you should ask your web hosting company to move your site to another server. This isn’t uncommon, so by moving the website to a less busy server, or even dedicated server, the page loading speed will immediately become better.
Neither users nor Google like slow loading pages. You can see the user dissatisfaction as an increase in the bounce rate in Google Analytics. It’s a metric that shows the number of users who viewed only one page and quit your website. Thus, it is an indication of the quality of your content and, therefore, your website’s performance. Google also records the time it takes for the browser to load your website from Chrome user experience reports. So, you can see the low speed score in tools like Google PageSpeed Insights if you don’t have a good enough speed of accessing it.
There’s one more metric that connects the search ranking and page load time – known as Time to First Byte (TTFB). It measures how long your browser takes to receive the first response from a server when you request a URL. This means that it measures the amount of time the server needed to process request and, subsequently, the amount of time it took to send the first byte of the response back from the web server to your browser. Therefore, the bottom line is that TTFB clearly shows a correlation between decreasing search rank and increasing time to the first byte. Websites with lower TTFB respond faster and have higher Google ranking than slower websites with a higher TTFB.
Final Words
Does web hosting affect Google search ranking? The answer is yes – you need a good hosting to have a fast loading and reliable website. Google loves fast and reliable sites and reward them by ranking on top of the search results. When you determined to make your online presence as a success story, it is essential to choose a quality web hosting for your website. You should be looking for a hosting company with quality customer support, especially if you’re planning a long-term contract and a more expensive package. If you have signed up for a long-term hosting contract and often have problems, you should ask for a refund and switch to another provider.
