Search engine optimization or SEO plays a huge role in how search engines like Google and Bing rank your website. Adding elements like page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and keywords helps search engines find your site and display it to people who search relevant terms. Search engines also grant higher ranking to high-performing websites with fast page load times and little or no downtime.
So, what does your web host have to do with search rankings? The quality of your web host can affect SEO by hurting your page load times, server quality, database connection, and general accessibility of your site.
Page Speed
You’ve probably encountered a website that took so long to load you abandoned it before getting the information you wanted. When a page is slow to load it’s detrimental to the user experience. Who wants to wait around for a website to finish loading? Google also doesn’t want to wait for your site to load and it will show in your search rankings.
One way to improve your page load time is to switch from shared hosting to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. While shared hosting is often less expensive, it also means you’re sharing a single web server with others. Shared hosting doesn’t necessarily slow down your website unless the server becomes overcrowded, which is an avoidable problem as long as your web host doesn’t oversell the space.
If you’re concerned you aren’t getting your fair share of the space available, you can switch to VPS. With VPS hosting, you’re still technically sharing a server, but not all of the resources. You get a designated amount of space and your VPS runs its own operating system, applications, and data.
Server Quality
Despite the possibility of slow pages, many people find that shared hosting is the best option for them. As long as you’re working with a high-quality server, page speed shouldn’t be a problem. Before deciding on a web host, learn more about how their servers are managed. A fully-managed server with knowledgeable tech support can monitor your shared server and make sure it’s functioning well.
Accessibility
Is your website taking off and generating a lot of traffic? That’s great! But if your server isn’t prepared for tons of traffic, it could crash. A sudden wave of website traffic could overload your server, causing it to crash. If you’re using a shared server, your site could face downtime if someone else’s website on your server experiences a huge increase in traffic. If your site is frequently down, it can have a negative effect on your search rankings. Search engines won’t keep sending traffic your way if your website can’t handle it.
After all of your hard work writing meta descriptions and page titles for every page of your site, you don’t want to lose website traffic because your web host isn’t working as well as it should. Fortunately, you can control the type of hosting you use and pair with the best web host for SEO.
